It’s becoming clear that the new rich thin client technology — Ajax — will make it into enterprise IT sooner rather than later.
Ajax (asynchronous communications, JavaScript and XML) has emerged as a new development technique for creating visually rich and interactive web applications. But if anyone thought it would be some time before Ajax moved from the realm of Google and Yahoo into the enterprise IT fabric, they’d be mistaken. It’s happening today.
Earlier this week, for instance, business rules software firm Ilog released an upgrade to its JViews graphical tools suite that includes Ajax-based dynamic charting capabilities, to help users more easily visualize large rules sets.
The Ajax tooling is maturing, too. Tibco announced last month that its Ajax development framework, General Interface, is adding support for open source and commercial third-party Ajax components.
Yesterday, hopping on the bandwagon it helped to start, Google introduced its own toolset for simplifying the development of Ajax web applications. But Google’s offering takes a far different approach than the flurry of Ajax toolkits being demonstrated on the floor of JavaOne.
What Google and all the other Ajax toolsets have in common is that they take higher-level approaches that eliminate or reduce the need to write JavaScript, which is used by developers who focus on user interface, rather than business logic.
Google’s new Web Toolkit varies by incorporating an engine that directly translates Java code to JavaScript. That’s a sharply different tack from most Java Ajax toolkit providers, who instead rely on Java Server Faces to generate Ajax components.
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Meanwhile Ajax interoperability organization, the OpenAjax Alliance, finalized its first roadmap, and said its goals are to identify and consolidate best practices, then define consensus programming models around a reference Ajax implementation so Ajax tools can interoperate. There are 31 member companies already, with the only significant holdout so far being Microsoft, which ironically invented the DHTML component of Ajax technology but promotes its own Ajax flavour called Project Atlas.
With Ajax seeping into enterprise software and the tools maturing rapidly too, now might be a good time make sure you or your organisation’s developers are up to speed on this exciting new technology.
