Interesting way to build rich client web applications: mjt

As I wrote a few weeks ago, someone working at Danny Hillis's start up Metaweb recently gave me an alpha invite to freebase so I have been experimenting with both their web services APIs and web application as I get some free time. Very cool stuff.

The freebase developers have released the mjt Javascript template library under a BSD-like license. This library enables you to write rich client applications based on web services that return JSON data. It takes more than a few moments to get used to the idea of client side templates but if you are used to server side tools like Java Server Pages (JSP), etc., the ideas are similar. I have done nothing with mjt (so far) except for reading the documentation and playing with the demos, but my first impression is that mjt would be very useful for developing web applications using back end services that are implemented in several languages/platforms that accept REST requests and return JSON.

I have been getting very comfortable with Javascript in the last year. I wrote an AJAX enabled web application for my customer yesterday and today using Common Lisp on the back end with client side implemented as Javascript, CSS, and HTML - a nice combination of REST web service calls to process AJAX calls and Lisp code to generate HTML as needed. If I was already fully up to speed on mjt, a reasonable alternative would have been to limit the back end Lisp code to just providing the REST web services and serving up static content. Anyway, mjt is well worth looking into.

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