Introduction to Ajax Frameworks

Healthy Warning: Its an introduction note to the Ajax beginners and late adopters to choose from the top frameworks. If you are an experienced d00d , don’t waste your time reading this

Prototype for downloads and more info

First of all, Prototype can not be called as an exclusive Ajax framework. It should be called as a Utility framework powered with Ajax.
Sam Stephenson created this amazing library of functions to ease our JavaScript development practices for the web developers. Best part of protoype are the shortcuts to handle the DOM elements, form elements, array and many more.

Prototype is backed with rich Ajax support. Periodical executor and ability to execute a js function on ajax returned html makes your life easier.Another great utility comes with the prototype is Try.these functions. This function will attempt to execute one path of code until it encounters an error, and then switch to the next path, way better than writing a browser detection code every time. Other than that this framework is powered with features like, key press event handler, mouse handler,class creator and even comes with ability to attach an event to the DOM using observe.

Scriptaculous downloads & more info

It is a collection of Web 2.0 style JavaScript libraries that help web developers add AJAX functionally to projects.The power of AJAX allows for rich user interaction without the trouble that has bugged traditional web applications. Building upon the wonderful Prototype JavaScript library, script.aculo.us provides you with some great additional value like adding some cinematic effects into your RIA efforts.

Google Web Toolkit downloads & more info

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don’t speak browser quirks as a second language. It comes with browser history management features that will compliment the back button issues in normal ajax application and it also have the ability to integrate with your JUNIT test cases. This is more recommended to developers who are more familiar with Java or C++.

YUI Library downloads & more info

The Yahoo! User Interface Library is a set of utilities and controls, in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. The YUI Library also includes several core CSS resources. It even have some of the coolest colorpicker and some other cool ajax ready to use features. Y! comes with features like darg and drop, tooltip, containers, widgets and many many more goodies. Y! is very serious about this community and its backed up with very good documentation and tutorials. I liked this one after prototype (thats just personal opinion )

Dojo downloads & more info

Dojo is the Open Source JavaScript toolkit that helps you build serious applications in less time. It fills in the gaps where JavaScript and browsers don’t go quite far enough, and gives you powerful, portable, lightweight, and tested tools for constructing dynamic interfaces.

Dojo powered with widgets like SortableTable, TitlePane, Form validation,Menus and menu bars and Google & Yahoo maps . If your a mashup developer, you may like Dojo over other frameworks.

Rico Downloads & More info

Rico provides a very simple interface for registering Ajax request handlers as well as HTML elements or JavaScript objects as Ajax response objects. Multiple elements and/or objects may be updated as the result of one Ajax request. Rico also powered with features like cinematic effects and drag & drop.

Atlas downloads & more info

I never used this. But my Brother did in his application.This new Web development technology from Microsoft integrates client script libraries with the ASP.NET 2.0 server-based development framework. In addition, “Atlas” offers you the same type of development platform for client-based Web pages that ASP.NET offers for server-based pages. And because “Atlas” is an extension of ASP.NET, it is fully integrated with server-based services. “Atlas” makes it possible to easily take advantage of AJAX techniques on the Web and enables you to create ASP.NET pages with a rich, responsive UI and server communication. However, “Atlas” isn’t just for ASP.NET. You can take advantage of the rich client framework to easily build client-centric Web applications that integrate with any backend data provider. It required Microsoft .NET Framework Version 2.0 .

I shall try Atlas on my Home PC one of these days

There are more tools like xajax, sajax, tiny ajax, MochiKit, xoad, haxe etc.

Personally if you ask my favorite, I go with the prototype for its amazing set of utility functions and the powerful ajax features. Plus a large community is using ruby on rails which integrated prototype. Opensource community already demanded adding prototype to core js libraries. So someday you should not be surprising to see prototype features on js core. If you are a .net guy, I badly want you to try atlas. It seems like very promising and cool. My second option will be YUI for its simplicity and power packed features and widgets.

Riya API Example – using Ajax

Here is my modified Ajax API example of Riya public search. I have used ‘xmlhttp.js’ from www.ajaxextended.com for cross domain access. I have also used prototype.js file keeping some other feature addition in mind. You can download the stuff here. Lemme know if you face any issues. Enjoi!

Ajax – Road Ahead

Over the last year, Ajax as a technology enjoyed a historic year in-terms of usage and glory. Ever since Adaptive Path published the article about Ajax written by Jesse James Garrett, most of us might have seen the way Ajax grown up as a technology. Today a search for  "Ajax Framework" in Google list more than 200000 links. As an Ajax programmer, I feel glad about it. But are we missing something here?

Everyone is busy developing their own Ajax framework for their web2.0 applications. And everyone is struggling with the cross browser JS issues that can spoil your hours and even days of efforts. Isn't this the right time to give a little thought about this? How about developing an Ajax framework that can submit for the approval of W3C and which can be easily integrate with any platform and technology. A framework that works just fine across the browsers as expected.

I may sound like crazy, but just imagine having a common piece of Ajax and that just works fine across the browsers. Imagine you are getting more and more time to do wonderful stuff using a solid ajax framework. Sigh! I hope one day Ajax – I – NATION happens

Meanwhile if you know any JS debugger for IE let me know

Ajax Resources

Alex Bosworth written a great article about the Ajax Mistakes often made by the web developers. read here

And there is a wiki which says, what are the places to use Ajax.

If you are developing an application using Ajax, you may need one of these cool activity indicators to show the stuff from server is loading. Talking about that, we have a cool activity indicator

Netjaxer helps you to have your web2.0 favorites on your desktop. Checkout their demo here

Here is a wonderful article talking about UI design for Ajax application

Barcamp Bangalore – Saturday, April 22, 2006 @ yahoo!

First Bangalore BarCamp will be conducted on April 22nd 2006 @ Yahoo!, Bangalore office.

I was li’l surprised to see a specific 9 – 5 scheduled time though!

There are 30 sessions for the day. 28 sessions are booked by now. I wanted/planning to attend the striked out sessions. And, hey our own Tara Hunt is giving a session about “Pinko Marketing“

1. Patterns in a UI framework (Manish Jethani)
2. Technosociality and its discontents : Cyborgs, cities and cyberspaces (Nishant Shah)
3. Beyond the PC – Mobile computing (Atul Chitnis)
4. Lessons in community management from the Bangalore LiveJournal community (Jace, with assistance from Nishant)
5. Mobile social software- attempts at building mobile focussed communities 1ClickBlog
6. The Art of Scrum – A revolutionary new approach to building cool products in a world of change (and still get home in time for supper)(Pete Deemer)
7. OLPC – One Laptop Per Child, The $100 linux based laptop,OLPC (Ramakrishna Reddy)
8. The system administration stack – Think beyond a single box. (Devdas Bhagat)
9. Fun with GNU Linux by codeShepherd ( To refresh in case you get bored )
10. Open Source Flash development tools – FAMES and likes. (Arul Prasad)
11. Next Generation Desktops: Applications, Trends and Coolness. (Shreyas Srinivasan)
12. Open Mobile Phone Reference Architecture (Rajiv Poddar)
13. Documenting Darwin’s theories using Photography (Kalyan Varma)
14. Mashups in the Enterprise (Jayanth Bagare)
15. Demystifying Music (Jnaneshwar Das)
16. Rich Internet Applications and Flex (Ramanarayanan K)
17. MindCanvas- Reimagine what online user research can be ..Amit Ranjan – Uzanto
18. Social and political implications of crypto – from privacy to DRM to National Security (Udhay Shankar N)
19. Modes of Programming – ‘Enterprise’ Vs ‘Systems’ Vs ‘Research’ Ravi Mohan
20. Let’s discuss – How to use technology in education and society Abdul Qabiz
21. VoiceXML: Internet over the telephone (Nilesh Trivedi)
22. Pinko Marketing – TaraHunt Pinko Marketing Wiki
23. Demo Session: Solution to traffic jam (Sushil Kumar, Jayanth Bagare, Sathish K)
24. Who is John Doe? Muthu on User eXperience Design
25. An Introduction to NPL – An Introduction to NPL, a programming language I designed. Suman Karumuri
26. Fire in the subcontinent – history of flame wars in the Indian FOSS movement – lawgon. Send interesting urls to lawgon at thenilgiris dot com
27. Darwin’s Theory and Participatory Culture (Vinayak Hegde)
28. Tryst With Blogging: Interesting Experiences. (Plus Personal Branding via Blogs) – Kiruba Shankar

I hope we will have some good fun over at barcamp

Ajax frameworks

If you ask me where you can find some cool Ajax framework resource I shall redirect you here