Looked at backbone.js and thought the same thing - overkill for what I needed. I'm always thinking "how will I scale this to portable devices", and one important consideration is code size. Plus IMHO HTML/JavaScript/CSS is quite MVC to begin with (HTML/CSS being the View, JavaScript of course is Controller logic, and just don't make the mistake of using the DOM as your data storage and use JavaScript objects for the Model). Maybe it depends on the complexity of the app, and I'd definitely look at agility.js first if I needed something since it's lighter than backbone.js ...
For building something that is content management, Django - as others have said - is a good choice. Going forward though, as a veteran C and web programmer I really like node.js. I think you will enjoy coding in JavaScript since it's like C syntactically, and you will really like the power and flexibility of node.js.
Also there are plenty of ORMs for node.js - I like Mongoose and mongodb personally, but there are several others.
I sort of like schema validation, but it makes it a pain to add things to your objects later if clients of your API are depending on that (they will break when you add something).
SOAP is really for client side programmers that can't figure out how to do an HTTP request and parse XML all by themselves. Also the sell is that you can use automation tools to generate your client side code for you, but I found that they do not all behave the same way when dealing with anything mildly complex (like an array of objects for example). Data streams are also a PITA to deal with in SOAP, there's really no good provision for it. So do yourself a favor and wash your hands of SOAP (ha ha!)
Thanks, I was just thinking about this exact problem and wondering if localStorage would be a good way to handle it. It looks dead simple from your code - just set an attribute with the JSON request as the value, and try to send it later. Lots of little other things to work out like tommi mentioned, but nice simple examples are really helpful.
Hmmm, I'd assumed it was a source-to-source compiler. Are they thinking of writing a JVM in JavaScript? Can you say slow? And debugging seems like a nightmare. And if it's not that, then how else does it get into the browser?
Yeah that just seems silly. But of course that's the Java way: add layers of abstraction wherever possible. Oh, and a big abstract IDE on top of it all would be really helpful ;-)
This is awesome - I have a 30' sailboat that I don't spend nearly enough time on. I would love to cut free for a while this like this guy! It sure would take a lot of courage.
Oh yes, and boats do require quite a bit of maintenance. I do most of mine myself and actually enjoy it usually, but it's not always on my schedule (although I try to be proactive, that helps).
One last thing: as a geek I really love fiddling with the boat systems. Having only two car-type batteries is not a lot, so I've been doing little things like replacing lights with LEDs (every boater should consider that IMHO for 1/8th draw and better longevity), changing how the charging system works, getting some solar going (in progress), etc. It's off the grid living!