Advantages of Ample SDK framework

Question

Browsing the Internet, I found the new Ample SDK JavaScript framework. From their about section:

Ample SDK is a standard-based cross-browser JavaScript GUI Framework for building Rich Internet Applications. It employs XML technologies (such as XUL, SVG or HTML5) for UI layout, CSS for UI style and JavaScript for application logic. It equalizes browsers and brings technologies support to those missing any.

Examples from their website look very promising.

Did anybody try using this framework in real projects? Which are the pros and cons of working with Ample SDK?

I'm mainly interested in your subjective real usage experience, and not in the information already available at their web-site.

Euphemia

Answer 1

Another very subjective opinion from the creator of Ample SDK ;)

Pros:

• Standard technologies and APIs make it simpler to take off
• Markup-based UI is easy to create and maintain
• Good separation of concerns - UI, Logic and Style
• Easy to create new UI elements and entire languages
• Non-obtrusive - only takes over designated areas on the HTML page

Cons:

• Does not aid well development of web-sites (for which jQuery is just enough), it is mainly suitable for client-side apps that run in browser and communicate only data with server.

Sakhuja

Thanks, Sergey. I think I'll give it a try some time (hopefully soon). Looks promising :) – Euphemia

Answer 2

We've used Ample in one of the components of our Enterprise Application.
Advantages we've experienced:

• Programming against well established API's (DOM, Dom Events) led to better code readability, more stable implementation of the end product, no programming against specific browsers.
• The development cycle was also reduced by up to 50% of our normal development time.
• The ability to create custom namespaces for component markup helped us to created a library of common UIComponents that can easily be changed,modified and used in all our future products
• The separation of the concerns of the UIComponents and the Application by creating a custom language itself is one of the big advantages. We now only focus on implementing the business logic instead of skinning components and fixing view related problems. The Q&A cycles we're also much shorter than normally because of the stability of the end product

Disadvantages.

• Hardly any. the framework is really stable and so far we did not ran into any problems with Ample.

Ty

Answer 3

I used in one project for the moment: http://www.programma.tv/.

As for that experience, I did not use any "UI language" (except XHTML, of course) from the A-SDK, just the core. Also I wrote custom UI language ("channels", "days", "items" and some more elements) and that was really simple in case you know javascript well.

But: think twice before implementing your own UI language (i.e. custom components) - maybe it'll be faster use something from the A-SDK?

Anyway, if you'll ask me to choose one word to summarise my opinion, I'd choose this one: "SIMPLE".

Beitnes

Thanks, 1ton. You have created a very nice website. I'd wish it to have Ukrainian channels, too ;) – Euphemia

I can see it is inserting contents entirely with JavaScript. Thus there is no search engine indexing. Was it difficult to implement it SEO-friendly with A-SDK? – Euphemia

First, it'd be great to understand: the SPI application always get troubles with indexing. Thus, there are two approaches for the SEO-friendly implementation: 1. Use ample.open() and ample.close() (see amplesdk.com/tutorials/adg/layout). With this approach you'll get only one page indexed as your application is SPI. (I don't you this one). 2. Use alternate plain HTML content for your application, which will be served only for the search engines (you can know them by User-Agent header). I use this approach. – Beitnes