Re: Gnoga current status

[Olivier Henley <olivier.henley@gmail.com>]

For the last year I used Gnoga extensively and I must say it is, IMO, beyond awesome.

1. The framework is rock solid. My web app (still private) has something like 30 users that interact on a daily basis, publish/subscribe, live push too many users, connect/disconnect, create a lot of dynamic content (events, widgets), embed Youtube assets and abuse the UI without a glitch. I had some issues, but they were my bad. Since I fixed them, almost two months ago, the server never failed or behaved in an unexpected way (timing in every aspect is coherent all the time, no surprises whatsoever and my bug rate just fell to plain zero.) This can probably be achieved using other language/framework, but it is surprisingly convincing how Ada/Gnoga brings you firmly there in such a short time. Personally, I won't even give a chance to another framework as Gnoga has been many orders of magnitude more robust and effective for my work than any other framework I have tried before.   

2. The idea to inject/manipulate in full duplex mode the DOM by driving automated jquery code through websockets is brilliant. For the most part, depending on your needs, you wont even have to touch html and/or javascript. You can inject css style directly from the backend/Ada code, but I find it cumbersome for heavy styling so I do use stylesheets a lot.

3. Finally, the demos that ship with Gnoga are really neat and cover a lot of ground. For my work, Chatanooga has been the most useful as it gives a good architectural overview of how to tackle live push between users. Most examples/demos are rather austere in term of presentation but, this has nothing to do with Gnoga per se. If you have a clear enough understanding of the 'web model', you should know that its power of expressiveness exclusively lies in the CSS styling. This contrasts a lot with more traditional UI frameworks like Gtk that 'gives' you styling through already defined widget looks. Gnoga/CSS gives you unlimited freedom but you get the responsibility to define every presentation design/details; if you create ugly widgets and modules you get an ugly page 'hands down' but the framework is not to blame nor the limiting factor. With Gnoga you could well serve a design/publicity award winning website as much as a cheap looking sex toy company website. When you get your hands dirty trying to make complex custom widgets that does not even exists in other 'predefined' UI framework you'll better grasp the implications of what I say: Gnoga drives the logic and the structure, CSS skins it.

Hope it helps,

Olivier