If you’re a developer, the cool thing about Ajax is that it lets you quickly mix and match web pages and services with relatively simple scripting, using technologies that are pretty off the shelf. But if you’re the kind of power user who can handle Excel macros, but doesn’t deal with scripting, until now you’ve been a spectator to the Ajax revolution.
The new tool, tentatively titled QED Wki (which stands for Quick and Easily Done), still requires back end work by real developers to expose web services or provide Ajax hooks that make data available for populating the universe of potential widgets.
It uses a combination of open source technologies including IBM custom widgets, is written in PHP using the Zend framework, and uses the Dojo toolkit that simplifies the infrastructure aspects of JavaScript programming.
But once those services or Ajax APIs are made available, business users can use the tool to first, choose the layout of the page and whether it should start as a blank, or contain maps, tables or grids, and so on.
Then you drag and drop the widget encompassing the data source or web service. For instance, if you were doing a supply chain-related app, such as checking weather conditions at different retail store sites, you might have services from the SAP system that query incoming deliveries by store site, a query to Google maps to physically locate the store, and a similar query to the weather service to pop up weather conditions and alerts for that locale.
Obviously, putting together such a mashup is relatively elementary to a developer. The innovation here is that the services are represented as high enough level business objects so they could be manipulated by a non-programmer.
IBM is testing this tool at 20 companies to look at how business users interact with it. And next month, they will make it available to developers via the new alphaWorks on demand site, which was just unveiled last week.
IBM made several other announcements at the conference, including the opening of a Web development zone on developerWorks providing resources for building Web 2.0 apps using Ajax, PHP, ATOM, RSS, and Ruby, as well as Web development frameworks such as Spring, Shale, Struts, Rails and Tapestry.
Additionally, IBM and the Mozilla Foundation are adding some new bells and whistles to the Eclipse ATF (Advanced Technology Framework) that allows Firefox browser clients to run, deploy, debug and configure Ajax technology on any Web server, including WebSphere, Tomcat, Apache, jBoss and WebLogic.
According to David Boloker, IBM’s CTO for emerging Internet technologies, and its unofficial Ajax evangelist, third-party support announcements for Eclipse ATF should be occurring within weeks.
