Evaluating AJAX Framework

Today building a new web application involves the essential step of evaluating AJAX frameworks and select an appropriate one. In this post I will detail the various criteria that should be considered while making a decision.

Adoption Criteria

This criteria is important for IT managers (or EA strategy) to decide if it would even be necessary for the development team to take a look and evaluate.

• Licensing Model: Under what license(s) is this product offered? How would that affect your organization?
• Cost: How much does the framework cost (upfront)? Also consider cost of development tools, support, consulting? How many free updates are there? If the framework is free, is there a PRO version? If so what are the benefits and cost?
• Frequency of Releases: What is the frequency of releases/updates? Is it adequate? This shows how active the framework is among the community?
• Technology Maturity: How long has the framework been around? How stable are the releases? What is the philosophy on backward computability? What is the product road map?
• Talent Pool: Is there talent pool available for this framework? What is the expected learning curve? Input from the developmental team is certainly helpful here.

Development Criteria

This criteria is will help the developers assess the framework viability.

• UI Components: Does the toolkit offer rich set of mature components? What is the future road map for new components? Are the components customizable?
• Programming Model: What kind of programming paradigm is supported? Is it strongly typed or dynamic? Is the model familiar to developers? If not what is the learning curve?
  
• Web Framework Integration: Are there web frameworks that provide some out-of-the-box support? Are there any conflicts (or challenges) in using this toolkit with web framework?
• Documentation Quality: Is there adequate good documentation available? Are there books available? If so what are the reviews?
• Browser Support: What browsers and versions are supported by the toolkit? What is the road map? Are the supported browsers sufficient for the requirements? What does the community say about this?
• IDE Support: Is there IDE support? How much do they cost? How do they fit in with currently used IDE?
• i18n: Is there support for multiple languages?
  
• Utilities: Frameworks provide utilities like Browser Manager(Back/Forward Button Support), Drag-n-Drop, Java-to-JavaScript Serialization (for example, DWR). Depending on specifics of the requirements this criteria should be considered.

Maintenance Criteria

This criteria helps to evaluate and foresee any maintenance challenges that may be encountered.

• Community Support: What is the size of the community using the product? How active and responsive are the online forums? Is the blog updated frequently?
• Hosting: Is there hosting support for the framework JS files? For example, Yahoo UI provides hosting support
• Profiling: Is there built-in profiling support? If no are there any external tools that can help? Are there browser related constraints in them?
• Beta Components: The frameworks tend to offer lot of Beta components. For these components its worthy to look at their known issues and assess the risk.
  

Conclusion

Analyzing and evaluating the frameworks using the above mentioned criteria will help make an informed decision and thereby will help avoid potential future issues. During the evaluation if a framework is missing a particular feature or component and is available in another toolkit you should look to ensure that there would be no integration issues and will peacefully co-exist. Please feel free to suggest perspective for improving the evaluation process.

Jaxer - An innovative paradigm

Jaxer is an open-source web application development framework providing an consistent Javascript based programming model between the cloud (server) and client. In this post I will provide an architectural overview of this technology and provide a conceptual mobile strategy that this framework can be used for.

Architectural Overview

The core of Jaxer is written in C/C++ and is powered by the same Mozilla engine that powers Firefox 3. There is a wrapper Javascript framework which can be easily extended by developers if needed.

Jaxer provides a plugin as post-processor to the web server and receives an static HTML as input. The core framework is responsible for parsing the input, executing scripts (server-side) and generating proxies.

The framework allows the developer to mark Javascript functions to be executed in the server using - runat="server" attribute in the script tag. There is also runat="server-proxy" where when the client calls are redirected to be executed in the server, the framework is responsible for injecting the methods.

From the server-side code there is also access to the Jaxer library and hence access to session, file system, database, network sockets, etc.

Thanks to Aptana for the image.

Mobile in Minutes

Here I would like to outline an use-case which will enable web properties to quickly create a mobile flavored output using Jaxer. This is intended to be a proof-of-concept and an example for the possibilities enabled by this framework. Lets say you have an existing simple web application and want to enable mobile flavored version modifying the existing application. This solution levereges the server-side processing of Jaxer to identify elements of interest from the HTML and renders a modified output.

Here the idea is to annotate on the HTML elements of the original output. It could be id="mobile-????". This step is just to identify elements of interest and construct a modified html. Here is a brief code snippet which should provide some direction and simply by injecting this script and marking ids mobile should do the job. This is no way intended to be a full-fledged implementation but to give a direction and server as a proof-of-concept:

var k = document.getElementById("b");
var m = document.createElement("body");
var e = document.getElementsByTagName("a");
m.innerHTML = 'Mobile rendering: ';
for ( var i = 0 ; i < style="font-style: italic;">
{
var l = e[i];
if (l.id == 'mobile') {
m.innerHTML = m.innerHTML + ' ' + l + ' +'';
}
}

k.innerHTML = m.innerHTML;

Infrastructural Support

Jaxer can "peacefully" co-exists with your open source technology stack. Jaxer can work with your existing Apache installation and have IIS support in their roadmap. Presently MySQL database is supported but definitely this is an area for improvement. There is also support Tomcat based deployment model and out-of-box support for running in EC2.

Conclusion

Emerging programming models such as Jaxer provide possibilities for more innovative web application extensions. This form of web extensions is extremely useful in enterprise and consumer environments to try-out in a plugin in on-demand.

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Yahoo releases Javascript UI Library

Yahoo has released User Interface libarary consisting of a set of utilities and controls written in JavaScript. It can be used for any web application and they also have documentation consisting of Design Patterns for using the library.

Click here