60,000 Lines of JavaScript... Wow. This post on the wdf-dom mailing list, which covers both large projects and large issues with JavaScript/DOM development, is fascinating to me. I've been noticing a growing number of powerful JavaScript / DOM browser based applications lately, from GMail, which includes a lot of in-page data updates outside of the full-page refresh cycle, to Kupu, which is a very powerful WYSIWYG style editor that effectively recreates WordPad or Netscape Composer inside of a web page. I've thought, recently, of getting back into this world. But usually, it makes me scream and cry. I have never had positive experiences with JavaScript, documentation, debugging, etc. This post, found via Tres Seaver, indicates that there are some really powerful and large scale projects being done with JavaScript and DOM. It also indicates that there are still some pretty big issues involved with undertaking such development.
On a related note, Nevow includes an interesting feature called LivePage:
LivePage was a Woven technology which allowed programmers to receive server-side notification of client-side JavaScript events, and to send JavaScript to the client in response to a server-side event. New for Nevow 0.3, LivePage has been updated to support Mozilla, Firefox, IE6 Win, and Safari.It's not just dynamic JavaScript rendering, it's dynamic transmission of JavaScript code to a page based on a server side event. I would like to imagine that this could even include sending messages to particular users when certain events happen and having those messages show up as JavaScript alert boxes, and having it all occur outside of the traditional web page refresh model.