Does Spry meet every requirement of this project?

Question

Hello everyone,
I can’t decide whether Spry can be used in my project
since I am a newbie in the Ajax world.
The main task of this project relates to online examining in
all middle schools of a province. The structure of each testing
paper is rather simple. It contains only 20 to 30 single choice or
multiple-choice questions. Once a student finishes a test paper, he
or she can press the Submit button to transmit all the answers to
the server for further processing.
The requirements of my project are as follows,
1) Calling CFC directly from within HTML file and easily to
handle the result returned from server in the client side. The
reason for using HTML file to represent a test paper is to
accelerate transmission speed.
2) Having full control over DOM elements, especially the
radio group buttons and checkboxes. If a student presses the Submit
button while he or she does not entirely finish the test paper, the
submission will be rejected. The browser gathers all the unanswered
questions via iterating all the radio group buttons to prompt the
student to do them again.
3) Making the radio button and checkbox to have a bit more
attractive appearance. The ordinary look and feel of these UI
elements is too unobtrusive.
4) Minimizing the size of the HTML file as smaller as
possible, so the size of JavaScript files including in the HTML
file should be smaller.
5) Transmitting the student’s information along with
the test paper answers. When submitting, the content passes from
the student to the server containing not only all answers but also
the student’s name, the client machine’s IP address and
the total elapsed time for finishing the test paper.
6) Having a small area in the test paper to receive the real
time messages from the teachers, which causes the HTML file to
access the server periodically.
So, Can I use Spry to accomplish all the requirements above?
Or maybe there is another better Ajax framework I should take.
Thank you in advance!
Alisa

Answer 1

Hello,
From the sounds of your post, you are not a newbie to web
dev. Here's the short answer. NO.
The long answer is "YES if you massage it to work".
As you have pointed out, you are mixing server-side with
client-side scripting. Spry is client-side.
It's up to you to determine what parts of you web app (the
test) you want handled by the server
vs. the browser.
Spry reads XML files so if you want to pass data to Spry via
the server, you can output in XML
and pass an event for Spry to update every second (or some
other event you desire). Good for
a live message que.
If you want to make snazzy UI form objects you can get a lot
of control from CSS. But as a fall back
make them in photoshop as image swaps.
20-30 question test page is not going to be a big deal for
bandwidth. AJAX coding is cached so if you
have multiple pages, the script can be reused from the
browser cache (saves on re-downloading the same file).
Grabbing IP's and time between request can be handled in a
multitude of ways either by the server, client or combo.
I recommend using a cookie to set the time start, build in a
timer on the page with js. and then validate on the server by
reading the POST/ GET, enviromental variables, and cookie. But
there are other ways...that's just my way.
In conclusion, there is no magic pill that will do everything
you want. You'll have to mix and match technology from AJAX, CFC,
HTML, JS, CSS, XML, DHTML, SQL, and whatever else you need to make
it do what you want.
Cheers,
JS