Friday November 03, 2006

My Experience with AJAX

I have been exposed to AJAX development environment with one of the class @SJSU and also from www.javapassion.com (Sang Shing). Sharing my experience on AJAX based on a class project (Location Based Album web application) may in relating to the new web development environment.
It is interesting to see the beauty of AJAX when we see the interactiveness of the web interface. It is very cool to the work of AJAXness with many of latest websites such as gmail.com and yahoo.com!

Our professor asked students to gather free AJAX components (>50) and placed @URL
http://ajaxcards.com/index.php?title=Ajax_Components  to make sure students can develop projects easily by integrate them together in web applications. You can see all AJAX components (many) from Sun, Google, Yahoo, Dojo etc.

When we started the project in aiming to use the above components (integration mainly), but never worked so easily for customization and integration!  In fact, we ended up with our own AJAX calls;) Of course we used some of the components and integrated in our web application. May be can't expect too much from money free things? We spent lot of time in debugging the JavaScript code! Many times faced the conflicts with DOM objects - such as object not found! during the integration of components.

Where to start in developing AJAX apps?

1. Have a good framework - such as Jmaki (https://ajax.dev.java.net/) and is a good wrapper framework  to start with. It is cool in organizing the major components' libraries, css, html pages. It is integrated at JSF tag level to Netbeans.  I think it had many bugs. Not worked well when we were trying with  other components. May be it needs more testing;)

2. Plan for customization and integration efforts. Don't assume external components work just like that!

3. JavaScript is key! Learn as much as possible before attempting to write AJAX based web apps.
   Look for good plugin with favourite IDE. I used Netbeans www.netbeans.org IDE with JS editor from http://www.liguorien.org/jseditor/ . It worked fine. I hope more plugins available in this area on Netbeans:-(

4. Check for good Javascript debugging tools. Venkman JS debugger on firefox browser (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/venkman) really helped me a lot! Otherwise finding "object not found" errors is not easy:-(

5. Aware of DHTML and HTML DOM tree to understand the objects and manipulation of objects. Also know about JSON objects. Easy for lightweight payload transfer than XML. Also it is better to know some well working AJAX patterns for more productive!


6. Select a good application server to host the web application. There are many free and opensource application servers available. We did demo on GlassFish or Sun Java System Application Server (http://glassfish.dev.java.net/) and demo was success!

Overall my experience showed AJAX is cool but need more effort than without. Hope more GUI based development and debugging tools available soon.
Enjoy with AJAX!


Posted by Jagadesh Babu Munta ( Nov 03 2006, 05:23:42 PM PST ) Permalink