May 24th, 2005
As a follow-up to his introductory presentation last year on connecting Mozilla applications to a LAMP (or WAMP) backend using XML-RPC, Jay Sheth will explain how to build large data-set applications on the same combination of platforms.
A convincing desktop/web-application hybrid can be built using XUL, JavaScript, PHP and MySQL by letting each component in this platform do what it does best. XUL has a rich set of user interface widgets (editable combox boxes, tabs, and so on) not found in HTML; thus XUL activated with JavaScript enables easy data entry and modification. PHP is great at getting data from external resources (local MySQL database, remote web service gateways), processing it, and sending it back to the browser. MySQL is great at storing, sorting and searching through data.
Jay will show how one can building a useful and usable rich web application by focusing on and combining each component's strength.
But sometimes, even using each component's strength results in a solution that is not as fast as desired. If the application is retrieving over 500 records at once, the main bottleneck is often the underlying transport protocol. XML-RPC can facilitate communication between Mozilla and the AMP backend, but also also proves to be resource intesive to parse on the client-side. This is due to the verbose structure of its underlying XML format. In order to speed up the retrieval of large chunks of data, the JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format can be used instead.
With the help of source code examples and a real world application, Jay will explain how to best use each part of the Mozilla + AMP platform, and how to alternate between the XML-RPC and JSON data transports in order to create a responsive, rich and useful web application.
He has also provided a bunch of
XUL links.
Thanks to Dan Krook and Platinum sponsor IBM for providing a great presentation space with seating for plenty.
As a service to our community,
New York PHP User Group Community meetings are always free and open to the public.