It only seems fit to blog all the recent efforts to reverse engineer these rich web applications. The interest in client-side processing is very justified. This is a natural evolutionary process for web applications and I am surprised that this did not happen quicker.
To quickly summarise the core idea – to push logic (javascript/XSLT) across to the client, acheive the objective of carrying out as much UI generation and processing on the client-side as possible. Frequency of visits back to the hosting server are cut down. This has a very desirable side-effect of cutting down on the ‘refresh’s’ the user experiences on his browser. The web application begins to feel and behave a lot like the desktop application.
How would you say this affects the wireless space? The frugal use of bandwidth is a very valid motivation for WML-based applications to follow a similar architecture.
Has anyone heard of a Wiclet?
Jon Udell – Google Maps pushes the envelope. Click article
But wait, there�s more. If you append the term �output=xml� to any Google Maps URL, the server will send back an XML packet. APIs? We don�t need no stinking APIs. In 20 minutes I was able to build a proof-of-concept app — made from snippets of HTML, JavaScript, and XSLT — that accepts city names or ZIP codes and displays information about local businesses. (Unfortunately, the XML feature has since been disabled.)
Try Google suggest!