RSF Discussions Forum

The World changes, and RSF changes with it. This last year, as well as seeing considerable consolidation and solidification of the RSF features set, has seen some exciting changes of direction for RSF, to reflect faster than expected changes in industry idioms. The client-side is increasingly where the most rapid change and exciting new affordances are to be found, and, to match its solid and idiomatic support for compositing markup fragments using an "AHAH"-type approach, this new release of RSF (0.7.3) has seen a full-scale move of the framework to the client-side, to parallel the AHAH-based AJAX approach with a complementary approach based on JSON and client-side rendering - in a decisive development, the RSF renderer (IKAT), component tree format and even the beginnings of its DataAlteration architecture have been ported into pure Javascript. This work is mirroring a closer alignment between RSF and the Fluid Project - in fact "RSF Client" is just another name for the Fluid Renderer which will form the basis of Fluid's approach to Client-side rendering in the Fluid 0.6 timeframe and beyond.

RSF's "nimbleness" and minimal philosophy have been paying dividends, since whilst most server-side presentation frameworks would have their idiom completely abolished by such a change in emphasis, RSF is only strengthened - whilst "RSF Client" has no physical depedendence on RSF Server, the potential to have cooperating clients and servers manipulating a shared model with a shared semantic promises to make development more cleanly and straightforward than ever before.

Here's to the next year, whatever crazy changes it brings!