I'm a bit late to the party, but I finally took some time to check out the Spry framework, Adobe's answer to the AJAX craze. I haven't been that impressed with AJAX. I mean, it's useful, yes. Very useful. But it's also kind of old and so it isn't really new to me. I've been thinking about learning a bit of AJAX for use in the back end of BlogCFC. I took some time early this morning to look at Spry.

Wow.

I mean, seriously, Adobe, could you make this a bit simpler? I think it was harder to put my shoes on this morning. Consider the following simple example (and this is not 100% complete, but it gives you an idea of how short the code is):

<script type="text/javascript" src="includes/xpath.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="includes/SpryData.js"></script>
<!-- load the xml, notice the xpath support -->
<script type="text/javascript"> 
var dsHatches = new Spry.Data.XMLDataSet("dharma.xml", "hatches/hatch");
</script>

<!-- now bind it to an html table -->
<div id="Hatches_DIV" spryregion="dsHatches">
<!-- Display the data in a table --> 
<table>
	<tr> 
		<th>Hatch</th>
		<th>Icon</th>
		<th>Active</th>
	</tr> 
	<tr spryrepeat="dsHatches">
		<td>{hatch}</td>
		<td><img src="/images/dharma/{icon}"></td>
		<td>{active}</td>
	</tr> 
</table>
</div>

So the first line loads the data set from XML. It uses XPath to translate this into a data set. I can then bind it to a table by using the spryregion and spryrepeat tags. Notice the use of bound variables inside.

I did run into one interesting problem. I knew that I needed XML, so I knew I couldn't just use my blog's main CFC. I wrote a new CFC that would handle the few methods I needed and return them as XML. (This was rather boring, but I did make two cool little functions you may like, arrayToXML and queryToXML. Both of these already exist on CFLib I think, but I wrote my own for the heck of it.)

I thought that was all I needed, but it wasn't loading. Then I tried making the same request Spry was, and I found out what it was. ColdFusion was wrapping my response in WDDX. So what could I do? (I wish CFC's had an option to NOT wrap the result in WDDX and just return it "bare".) I wrote another file, this time a CFM. It simply acted as a proxy to call my other proxy CFC. It then returned the XML correctly.

I think I spent more time in ColdFusion then I did in JavaScript. That to me is a good thing. It means Adobe really did a darn good job with this framework. This is exactly the kind of thing I can see using in real world applications.

I definitely recommend my readers to take a few minutes and download the framework. I think you will find it worth your while.