[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Rethinking "no Dojo" in TT OPAC

[Bill Erickson]

On 6/14/11 6:11 PM, Dan Scott wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 01:44:36PM -0400, Lebbeous Fogle-Weekley wrote:

<snip>

>> If Dojo's available, there's a temptation to do all the work with
>> client-side logic, disenfranchising a small but real number of
>> users. And if Dojo's available, it's a small step to Dijit.  Nobody
>> really benefits from fade-ins and spinny things when they just want
>> to find some books or pay a fine, so I think we definitely want to
>> leave that out.  And then there's the existing JS fieldmapper and
>
> Agreed.
>
>> other stuff that we might want to reach for, let alone the
>> Javascript for Google Analytics and ChiliFresh and so on that we
>> kind of already need to use anyway, and before you know it 31 kb is
>> 3100 kb, which has a real impact on usability for *lots* of users.
>
> Except, we're talking about it right now. So we could easily agree as a
> team that Evergreen's TT OPAC will never include Dijit or Dojox. Anybody
> else can fork Evergreen and include amazing spinny things, but we have
> the ability to say that we won't support anything beyond Dojo base.

Like Lebbeous, I'm not anti-Dojo, particularly for integrating added 
content, but I don't like the idea of requiring it for the baseline 
catalog.  It's not a fear of Dojo or 31KB, but a fear of what it means 
for future development.

For the sake of discussion, I'd like to propose a significantly more 
strict set of boundaries than Dan's on the use of Dojo, should we decide 
to go this route:

* It can only be used for retrieving and displaying remote content, i.e. 
content that comes from another server, whose response time is not 
controlled by Evergreen.

* Dojo and any code that depends on it is only loaded on pages that 
offer such added content and then only when the added content is enabled.

I realize this might seem excessive, but my fear is if we open the door 
to Dojo anywhere, even if we're forbidding Dijit, Dojox, etc., the OPAC 
will unwittingly evolve into a JS-driven interface, even if we're not 
using it to initially retrieve the data.  The temptation seems too 
strong.  I would sincerely like to avoid that.

-b

-- 
Bill Erickson
| VP, Software Development & Integration
| Equinox Software, Inc. / Your Library's Guide to Open Source
| phone: 877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
| email: erickson at esilibrary.com
| web: http://esilibrary.com

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