Over the past few months I’ve become both more comfortable with Javascript and more impressed with what is possible with the language (more on that, with an example, in a few weeks). Doing lots of work with web application frameworks, I’ve become convinced that writing a framework entirely in Javascript would be both possible and useful. After meeting James Darling at UKGovWeb09 and checking out his Coup De website, I started considering the idea more seriously. I had a free day last Sunday and got coding. The result is jsFrame.

jsFrame is a web framework built entirely upon Javascript, HTML and CSS. It makes heavy use of Prototype.js and unlike some Javascript systems (such as coup-de) it uses the Model-View-Controller pattern and only loads Views as requested. This means that complicated applications are quite simple to develop, though it also means that simple pages take longer to load than they would with a normal website. I am particularly proud of the simply routing system, which is able to handle pretty URLs with a simple .htaccess file and my Javascript code. For more information, check out the demo site.

Non Javascript hackers can take several things away from this: the browser is becoming more and more the basis for rich web applications, and without Flash; network connections can still be a performance bottleneck despite faster connections, particularly on mobile browsers; reasonably advanced web projects can be executed in a short period of time. Oh, and I’m pretty handy with Javascript and web frameworks, and you might want to hire me!