Not really new at all, but the approach is: I started using just javascript to develop web apps - no server - the apps just interface with a server to get and post data.
That's fun, especially with jQuery, which I highly recommend.
That's fun, especially with jQuery, which I highly recommend.
The first one that is almost wholly free of server-side code is a "news" module that pulls a feed from our forums News category on our company website. ExtJS makes this kind of thing trivial (one of their example apps is an RSS feed reader that uses Google Gears). Other short-term bits will be converting all of our graphs to dynamic versions that change every minute or so. Bigger plans include a terminal emulator to replace the Java applet SSH client we currently include. Interactive terminals are trickier, and I'm not sure if we'll end up implementing the actual full terminal emulator in JavaScript or do most of the work server-side and just pass things down to the server (probably the latter at first). But, very short-term (like being released sometime this week) it's all just conversions of existing widgets to present nothing but JSON--it actually makes the server-side code remarkably simpler to not have any UI elements.