SitePen: Reinhardt: a Client-side Web Framework

A typical server-side web framework today includes three main components: a URL dispatching to some controller object scheme, a template engine, and a data mapping facility. Currently in Dojo, you’ll find that the latter two items already exist. dojox.dtl provides the first one, and dojo.data provides the second. We provide SitePen Support customers with a custom-built user interface for managing their support account. When we started working on this customer interface, we opted to make the entire user interface driven by JavaScript. The server-side provides data and data manipulation functionality via JSON-RPC, but does not dynamically serve up pages as a typical web app would. All along, we’ve had code to differentiate the URLs coming into the Support customer interface. For example, /?login would take you to the login part... [read full story]