Ajax Technology for Web Application Developers

Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a standard based technique for web application developers to create user interfaces for the applications deployed on the server. Ajax doesn’t depend on the used server technology and can work with applications Java EE, .Net and others. Using Ajax software developers write the JavaScript code in addition to the standard HTML and create rich interactive user interface.

Later Java software developers had to cope with numerous incompatibilities between Netscape, Internet Explorer and other browsers. In some cases even the different versions of the same browser were incompatible. Although some of these incompatibilities still exist, most internet applications usually require Internet Explorer 5.5 and higher and/or Firefox 1.0 and higher where most of these existing earlier problems were solved.

In the past most software developers who wanted to work with Ajax had to start from the scratch performing a great number of routine operations which they can now perform using the Ajax tools. These tools help software developers create Ajax-based interfaces. Moreover, tools also represent a higher level of abstraction concealing from web application developers the above mentioned incompatibility of browsers.

Till recently most JavaScript developers practically didn’t have good development tools which could help them at debugging and in general make their life easier. Since the emergence of the Firefox browser, some useful for Ajax developers plug-ins appeared in it and the IBM have recently integrated a set of useful technologies into the Ajax Toolkit Framework aiming at solving this problem. In the Ajax Toolkit Framework, which can be downloaded for free from the Apache site, there is Ajax development environment based on Eclipse. Moreover, the ATF has such tools as a syntax sensitive JavaScript editor, a JavaScript console and an object viewer XMLHTTPRequest as well as built-in Dojo, Zimbra and Rico.