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Two Sides to AJAX Toolkits


By Allen Holub
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March 15, 2006 —  (Page 1 of 2)
Most open-source AJAX libraries are not commercial grade. That is, most of the libraries are missing chunks of functionality, and the documentation runs from poor to nonexistent. You’ll have to weigh the pain of wading through the JavaScript sources and creating your own documentation against the pain of writing all this JavaScript from scratch.

One significant exception to this rule is TIBCO’s General Interface 3.1—a commercial product with an impressive drag-and-drop GUI-style user interface builder and decent documentation. The actual AJAX components are solidly built and look great on the screen, and you can throw together a UI in record speed.

Corporate Visual Basic developers will be right at home with General Interface, and it shouldn’t take more than an hour or two to be productive with it. General Interface is a whole framework, not just a widget library, and it has many of the problems of frameworks (such as a framework-imposed directory structure on your projects). But if you’re used to a framework approach, you’ll love it. The General Interface GUI is interesting in that it can run hosted in a browser (though you’ll get a bunch of annoying pop-ups warning about ActiveX controls when you try it).

One place where TIBCO differs from the alternatives is in how the AJAX widgets talk to your application. Most libraries perform a simple HTTP POST or GET. General Interface uses SOAP for everything, which is a mixed blessing. SOAP does completely isolate the UI from the underlying application. General Interface has no server-side component—you just use whatever SOAP provider you like, including Java’s Web services framework.

The down side is that your application has to understand SOAP. You’re trading off the need for writing simple servlets with the extra complexity (and performance hit) associated with a SOAP interface. The SOAP strategy makes good sense in a corporate environment where the server-side stuff is written in languages like Visual Basic, but it can be an annoyance if you’re writing in Java (or PHP, or any language that doesn’t have SOAP built in).




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