The Zimbra AJAX Toolkit (AjaxTK) A Toolkit for Developing Rich, Browser-based Applications
Since the launch of the Web, application developers have faced a trade-off between “thick” client applications (such as those based on PowerBuilder, VisualBasic, and .NET) and “thin” client applications that run in a web browser and have traditionally consisted of HTML pages constructed by a web application server via technologies such as JSP, ASP, or PHP. While webbased applications have freed developers from the need to provision, update, and secure software on the client, they have not, at least as of yet, provided the richness of thick clients. That gap in user experience between web-based and native clients has been closing with the introduction of technologies like Dynamic HTML (DHTML), which combines JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets within web pages. With the recent emergence of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), the gap is closer to disappearing altogether.
While the name AJAX has only recently been coined, the underlying technologies (JavaScript a.k.a. ECMAScript, XML, SOAP, and so on) have been maturing for years. AJAX applications combine the rich UI experience of programmed clients (after all, AJAX means the UI logic is a JavaScript program) with the low-cost lifecycle management of web-based applications (no client installations or updates). Under AJAX, the relatively thinner layer of UI rendering logic is programmed in JavaScript and downloaded to the client, but the business logic remains on the server, where it is typically coded in Java, C#, PHP, C/C++, and so on?indeed any programming language with XML and web service bindings. The communication model between AJAX client and server accommodates the same rich interaction scenarios (including server push to the client) afforded by traditional client/server.
Moreover, AJAX is more seamlessly integrated with web standards (HTML, URI, etc.) than alternative browser plug-in technologies such as Flash or Java applets. In fact, AJAX is already a web standard, so it runs uniformly (admittedly with a bit of testing) across browsers, operating systems, and hardware. (We anticipate that some existing Flash/Flex users will choose to build their next-generation web applications in AJAX, while incorporating existing, especially less interactive, Flash content within their AJAX UIs.) AJAX also leverages the same security model of traditional web applications: privacy via SSL/TLS and authentication via userid/password or via public key infrastructure). As with other web applications, authorization is done on the serverside.
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Tags: Ajax, ECMAScript, HTML, Web
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