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Dev Trends
Speed AJAX Development with ATF
The new AJAX Toolkit Framework promises a comprehensive open source solution for JavasScript-based development of data-intensive, Web-based business apps
10/18/2007
Businesses running data-intensive Web applications need Web pages that can update incrementally. The technology to do so has been accelerated since 2005, with the advent of open standards such as AJAX, which is the acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript (JS) and eXtensible Markup Language (XML).
Expert programmers have been able to build AJAX-type applications for years. However, the rest of the programming community needs frameworks and integrated development environments (IDEs) to accomplish the task. The programming community also needs easier languages than C++ and Java, and JavaScript has satisfied that need. It looks a bit like Java but is otherwise unrelated -- and much simpler to use.
The framework part of the data-intensive Web app puzzle is still being tackled. The AJAX Toolkit Framework for Eclipse (ATF), now in development, is one effort to help ease the effort of programmers developing data-intensive Web apps.
Details about the new ATF Framework were described at the recent AjaxWorld conference by Robert Goodman, an IBM software engineer who's the ATF project leader. He demonstrated ATF's components and also provided information about a proposed JavaScript Development Tool (JDT).
What's ATF?
ATF provides tools for creating and debugging AJAX applications. Those tools include enhanced JavaScript editing capabilities, such as edit-time syntax checking, and an embedded Document Object Model (DOM) browser. The DOM is used to represent HTML or XML formats and the like with a standard object model independent of platform and language.
ATF tools also include a JS debugger, JS console, an embedded Mozilla Web browser (Firefox), support for various AJAX toolkits, such as Dojo, Zimbra and Rico, and tools for Cascading Style Sheets.
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