Taconite: The Power of Simplicity

In any web development plan, tackling the requirement of each browser is always a challenge. Web developers have to think of building their application to be browser friendly not only in IE and Firefox but also in relatively popular browsers such as Safari, Flock and other browsers that are preferred by a specific market.

The solution to this problem is often a very tedious one: letting developers rebuild their application for the specific browser. That solution derails the planned launch date of some websites as developers would have to work again and again for the specific browser.

Fortunately, there are frameworks out there that can easily solve this problem. One of them is Taconite. This framework may be just another framework that has this function. If you closely take a look at its functions it is almost the same with other frameworks.

However, what makes this framework unique is on the way it eases the problems of developers. Instead of highly complicated functions, Taconite has developed a parser that converts XHTML to JavaScript, letting the developers build the application in no time.

Aside from efficiently translating some of the functions into JavaScript, here are the additional features of Taconite:

Server-Side friendly – popular server side development applications could be integrated with Taconite. The framework could help developers build an application that would end up wither a JSP or JavaScript. As an added requirement, server-side integration has to be placed for JSP to be possible.

The only requirement for a server-side to be admitted is the ability of a framework to return XHTML. This requirement should not even bother most developers since most server-side frameworks such as ASP.Net for Ajax, PHP and JavaEE has the ability to return XHTML.

InnerHTML Removed – by removing InnerHTML, developers eliminates the basic problem of cross browser compatibility. The reason why InnerHTML cannot just be available in different browsers since it was not standardized by the W3C. If it will be standardized by W3C, this will still set some problems for developers since even though they can build really good looking websites, customizing InnerHTML is very tedious.

For example, when they have established a table in the website in an InnerHTML template and then something comes up that they need change it, they have to rebuild the function all over again. Taconite removes InnerHTML and instead offers easy customization of the website particularly in refreshing only specific parts of the webpage.

Since its development Taconite has been used from small to large websites. Its popularity grew more and more and other developers have built a plug in so that it could be integrated to jQuery.

Taconite does not really want to distinguish itself as a revolutionary framework. Instead of reinventing the wheel it has built a simple alternative for developers to consider. With the developers familiarity with other frameworks, developers of Taconite is confident that their framework would be able to be used and reused for different functions.

Taconite is an open source framework. Documentations, samples and official download are available in Sourceforge.