Neil's News

Table Sorter

11 September 2006

With MobWrite complete, the next project is a full browser-based IDE. Naturally this will be extremely heavy on client-side functionality. My first choice was to use GWT to decrease programming time and increase reliability. But the seven minute compile times quickly put a stop to that idea. So I threw that all out and started mapping out a more conventional DHTML approach. This quickly turned into a bottomless pit of unstructured programming, something I'd hate to have to support in the future. So I've put that to one side, and am currently exploring client-side XSLT. Fun stuff. Up to now I've ignored XSLT due to the lack of Opera support, but that changed a couple of months ago with the release of Opera 9.

In the mean time, I thought I'd share this DHTML table sorter. If XSLT is as good as it seems to be, the DHTML table sorter won't make it into my project, but it's a very useful script none-the-less.

Update: XSLT turns out to be considerably less useful than expected. Once rendered, the original XML vanishes. I'd assumed that the point of XSLT was so that one could modify the XML's DOM and have the HTML rerender on the fly. Well, that was a waste of time. Back to DHTML.

Update: A new version of GWT was released in November 2006 which apparently is much faster. It's too late for my project, but I thought I'd mention it.

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