I’ve had a rush job to do for an old friend, building a ticker to be used at an event for a major news organisation this weekend. The data for the ticker is sourced from SMS messages, and the ticker itself will be on a big screen at an event.
The interesting part has been using Twisted/Nevow, so I can use Livepage. This means the front-end has been written in Javascript, with the server controlling the UI directly. As messages arrive by SMS, they are sent to the ticker directly, without requiring a reload. Similarly, all the controls are client/server, so everyone watching the control panel sees the same rendition.
It works perfectly, although IE is slower to update than Firefox. It’s a whole new way of writing web applications for me, but having had such immediate success, I think I’ll be doing a lot more like this. It really is like writing traditional 2-tier apps. My hatred of javascript has been assuaged somewhat also. Everything I’ve done so far has worked fine in both browsers (except for a fade, which relied on an IE filter), without needing specialist knowledge.
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