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My question might not be understandable enough, so let me explain the situation :

I'm working on a big ajax webApp built, server side, with PHP using CodeIgniter. This framework saperates clearly models, controllers and views. The view files are rendered in HTML and then sent to the client that does some js treatments on it (like attaching events).

This way of working seems strange to me, as it separates the view between the server side and the client side.

I was thinking about moving all the View treatments to the client part that will build dynamically its html in js. The server side will then send only raw data.

I worked this way on smaller projects, and I was really happy with the result (easily understandable, portable and reusable).

Is it a right way to implement an MVC app ? Any advices around that reflexion ?

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  • just a toughts: whenever ajax become more popular webmaster now have to do the websites 2 times! (doh!) Commented Mar 23, 2011 at 0:00
  • O'Reilly has a book out called JavaScript Web Applications...which supports you indirectly...it shows how more functionality is moving toward the client...I compose my view on the client too, and recently moved my session management to the client as well. Commented Jul 1, 2012 at 0:11

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I've done pretty much what you are describing on a fairly large data services app as an internal application. In my case I was using ExtJS for the client-side rendering/views, and was communicating to a C# WCF endpoint exposed on the web server. Essentially requests were made/submitted and responses were serialized to/from JSON. It ran very smooth, once some kinks were worked out. The original author had written a custom serializer to do direct results from their data layer directly... this leads to a lot of extra data going down the pipe. As long as you are judicious with your payload data it can be very effective.

Some caveats though...

  • You should probably avoid this if you expect users without javascript enabled to be able to access the site (anything involving money transactions from external users).
  • You will want to document your methodology as clearly as possible.
  • Finding developers for maintenance tasks after you have implemented your application will be very difficult. (many server-side devs are shy of, scared of, or just plain inneffective with JS skills.

For the most part it's a toss up, I find that most people at least have JS enabled, but may have other things blocked off. AJAX/XmlHttpRequest supports is nearly universal at this point.

As to templating for client-side display, there are a few options there (but that's a separate discussion).

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Building JavaScript views works fine within the MVC pattern, since your view is not mixed in with your business logic or model.

However, there are a couple drawbacks to using full javascript views. Mainly it eliminates the ability for graceful degradation if the client has javascript turned off. Also, some browsers (IE) don't have a very fast javascript engine, which will make your page load more slowly. It is true that some of the view is separated between the client and the server, but it kind of makes sense when you think about it.

In most cases the HTML that you send to clients is the same for everyone (unless you are doing browser detection on the server side). However the JavaScript routines are different. If you are using a library like JQuery, this will be hidden from you, but the code that is running on each client may differ greatly. One example of this would be the XMLHttpRequest that is used by firefox/webkit etc browser and the active x control that is used by IE. Since the html portion of the content is the same for everyone it makes sense to build on the server, and since the JavaScript portion of the view may differ, it make sense that it is built on the client side.

HTH

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I started using the same approach: JavaScript for the user interface layer and PHP for the database access layer. I'm using AJAX to pass all the data back and forth between the 2 layers. So far, AJAX has occasionally frozen on me, but it has been speedy enough most of the time. So I guess it'll work well enough.

(The result is that my code has gone from 90% PHP with 10% JavaScript...to 65% JavaScript with 35% PHP.)

I've also separated the code for my page views from the code for my triggered event action functions. So I like to think that I have an MVC arrangement now (even though I'm not using an off-the-shelf MVC framework like Backbone.js).

I'm not using HTML templates, though. I don't think it feels natural to have 100% separation between HTML and programming. I think simple programming loops, conditional statements, and JavaScript triggers all go nicely with HTML.

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If you will think it in the way that there is the main view that creates the html/js engine and couple of ajax views with the data streams - it will be quite OK in MVC terms imo.

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Is there anything more dynamic going on on the site itself? Does it do more AJAXy things, dynamically refresh parts of the site etc.? If so, it may be reasonable to have a Javascript-only site.

Since this is not how the web traditionally works though, sending HTML from the server is still the baseline. If your pages are basically static, if you want to serve older clients, an audience that may have disabled Javascript, an audience that may have accessibility problems with Javascript-only pages, alternative clients that cannot understand Javascript or search engines, you should serve HTML pages from the server. There's nothing wrong with it, it's straight forward, simple and foolproof. There are many things to consider when reinventing the wheel in Javascript on the client side. Unless you have a good use for the potential this offers (see for example the highly dynamic Facebook or Twitter pages), it may be more trouble than it's worth to your users.

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Actually all server requests are ajax requests, that's why it makes sense to me to work this way. Do we still have to think, in 2011, of non-js browsers ?
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It sounds like you are one step away from going from the MVC pattern to the MVVM pattern.

MVVM is ideal for complex user interfaces (which is exactly what you would be creating with all the AJAX and JavaScript and whatnot) because in this case your HTML view will be able to act as the controller via JavaScript. There is a library (warning: I've never used it but it looks promising) for this called Knockout JS.

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Interesting, I didn't know that pattern. I'll take a look, thanks !

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