Nexaweb is one of an emerging group of providers who are developing tools to make mashups more enterprise driven through features that streamline data binding, performance, and application management. Its current announcements are part of a wave of releases that are coming out of the AjaxWorld conference in Santa Clara this week.
The event handling enhancement is in the form of a visual, declarative designer that lets you right click on Ajax widgets that you’ve put on the page to get drop down menus that let you choose if you want to link the widget to an event, and what kind of event to use. Once you choose the event, you can navigate through a wizard that helps you configure it.
Examples of events are to wait for user input, hook up to a publish/subscribe event such as an RSS feed or a data source that triggers an event when it is updated.
Previously, you could make widgets event-driven, but you would have had to manually code them with your client side web development or scripting language of choice.
The new version also simplifies the making of connections between heterogeneous widgets. Nexaweb calls them managed code objects, which means that it wrappers the object, whether it be a Java, JavaScript, or C# objects. The wrapper has a tag that simplifies connecting with it, and it offers life cycle support, such as creation and retirement.
With this release, Nexaweb is tightening interfaces with several partners.
They include Layer 7, which hands off security management, such as inspecting an object that is being deployed from server down to the client. The goal here is to prevent the object from being hijacked by malware, and therefore prevent common web problems like cross-site scripting or data injection from sullying an Ajax object on its way to a Web 2.0 client.
Nexaweb is also tightening its relationship with HP’s Systinet SOA registry/repository, which subjects Ajax assets that are deployed through web services to enforce policies. And of course there is the recent relationship with Kapow, which extends the reach of Nexaweb’s data bindings to unstructured data.
Nexaweb Enterprise Web 2.0 Suite is available now.
