Hi, I just noticed there's a lot of postings on this thread.
Ian: I only spent half an hour or so to make a bridge between Django and Ben's RailHelpers. Thanks for the concern, but don't worry about it. My code is public domain and anybody can use and modify if they like. I did a bit more of Ajax programming and begin to use MochiKit. It's really usefull when doing client side dom creation. I'm now using both MochiKit and Prototype, but it would be nice if MochiKit can incorporate Prototype functionality. Ben, do you know when MochiKit1.3 will be released? Ben, Eugene: I think one of the difference between "helper" approach and "widget" (especially dojo.widget) approach is whether you want to specify "parameters or behaviors" of elements in the page using (proprietary) DOM attributes or using parameters to helper tags. So dojo.widget is probably more designer friendly, but since Django template system already has tags, helper approach is as suitable for Django. Another difference is whether you have inline javascript or not. Sometimes inline javascript is handy (like when you're sending back element with behaviors because you don't have to trigger setup code after the element is inserted). As long as we're doing AHAH, I feel both approaches may not be so different, but once models and logics are dealt in client widget approach seems to be more suitable to me. Btw, both approaches have to provide tags/atributes/parameters in the template. I'm now thinking of combining helper or widget approach with Ben Nolan's approach which mimics CSS's way of separating document structure and design.(http://bennolan.com/behaviour/ , http://www.schuerig.de/michael/javascript/). Basically just using helper or widget inside Behavior's rule definition file. This way if you have many templates which use same helper or widget, you only have to assign class and don't have to repeat/scatter code across many templates. It's also a snap to swap behavior across many templates. Ben: RJS sounds interesting. How does it work different from other helpers? Eugene: Your article is excellent. I like it a lot. -Louis
