Modularization and incremental adoption

Today's demonstration on the backplane call was exciting because it showed 
the feasibility incremental adoption through modularization.  In this case 
the module is "submission" from XForms and the adopter is a web 
application author using an Ajax library.

In my mind, the first order of business is to drive home this point by 
showing how a common declarative markup for submission communications 
could be leveraged into different Ajax programming contexts based on 
creating the right "glue" code.  This will also really drive home the 
point that a key to integration is the event model associated with these 
declarative markup constructs, as the events provide the hooks needed by 
these libraries.

To get the rubber to meet the road, we need two things here. 

First, an articulation of the "glue" that makes this demo work under at 
least one other Ajax library, like Yahoo UI or Scriptaculous.  The more 
the merrier but at least one other is needed.  This argues for 
interoperability at both the technical level (e.g. mashups) and the human 
skills level.

Second, we need the articulation under at least one of the libraries (e.g. 
Dojo) of the same application of the same sample application not using the 
glue plus the submission module. 

Our position here is that both the submission construct *and* the glue to 
a particular Ajax library would be available to the Ajax programmer in 
lieu of their constructing their own ad hoc means of submission.  But we 
still need to concretely show that the Dojo programmer, for example, 
derives a benefit without needing to interoperate with some other library. 
 So, we need an example that is big enough to show that it is harder to 
roll your own submission than it is to use an XForms submission and import 
the XForms submission module and the dojo submission glue code.

Once we have the above, I think it is a short trip to the bank, so to 
speak, to say that the Ajax libraries are just stand-ins for other W3C 
markup technologies.

Cheers,
John M. Boyer, Ph.D.
Senior Technical Staff Member
Lotus Forms Architect and Researcher
Chair, W3C Forms Working Group
Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software
IBM Victoria Software Lab
E-Mail: boyerj@ca.ibm.com 

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