The framework, called Direct Web Remoting, or DWR, enables Java developers to avoid having to get into a lot of the nitty gritty of writing configuration files or transforms to translate Java methods so they could be read by client-side JavaScript.
DWR was created by Joe Walker, a UK-based independent software consultant. The Tibco agreement gives him breathing room to spend more time developing it.
In turn, Tibco will develop interfaces so that DWR objects appear as native JSF (Java Server Faces) libraries within its General Interface Ajax IDE, and wrapped as services within its ActiveMatrix SOA fabric.
In essence, DWR provides an alternative to the popular XMLHttpRequest object, meaning you won’t have to write code to transform your objects into XML and serialize it. And you won’t have to write Java servlet code to handle Ajax requests to Java objects sitting back on the server.
But the fact is that DWR is not very widely used at this point, in large part owing to the fact that until now there has not been any large open source organization like Apache or commercial vendor behind it.
But as Walker writes in his blog, with the new Tibco backing, he’s not about to expand DWR to cover anything beyond being a remote eventing mechanism. In other words, DWR won’t expand to add its own GUI widgets or deal with cross-browser issues, like the Dojo toolkit.
In many ways, the emergence of features like DWR recall the development of the old 4GL languages, which had their own proprietary mechanisms for triggering or fielding remote events. It enabled developers to focus on logic, presentation, and data, rather than having to deal with the plumbing of writing fat client widgets like radio buttons or data grids (or, as Microsoft called them, visual controls).
And that’s a critical part of the rationale behind Tibco’s backing of DWR, which enables developers to think in terms of widgets for an interactive application rather than pieces of an HTML page.
This way you don’t have to deal with the abstract sof an HTML DOM [Document Object Model, said Kevin Hackman, director of marketing for Tibco’s General Interface Ajax tooling business.
