AJAX Toolkit Framework Overview

Background

Asynchronous JavaScript And XML, or AJAX, is a web development technique for creating interactive web applications using a combination of:

Like DHTML, LAMP, or SPA, AJAX is not a technology in itself, but a term that refers to the use of a group of technologies together.

Features

The AJAX Toolkit Framework (ATF) provides extensible frameworks and exemplary tools for building IDEs for the many different AJAX runtime offerings (Dojo, Zimbra, etc) in the market. These frameworks will contain features for developing, deploying, debugging and testing AJAX applications. Tools built upon these frameworks will initially include: enhanced JavaScript editing features such as edit-time syntax checking; an embedded Mozilla web browser; an embedded DOM browser; and an embedded JavaScript debugger. Because it is a framework, ATF will provide for the development and incorporation of additional AJAX development tooling. ATF will use existing Eclipse extensions for web application deployment so that the environment will be ?server agnostic? ? that is, a developer may easily extend the framework to deploy their AJAX application to an arbitrary new class of server. Initial adapters will include a J2EE / JSP adapter and an Apache / PHP adapter. An additional and unique aspect of the framework is the Personality Builder function, which assists in the construction of arbitrary AJAX runtime frameworks, thus allowing those runtimes to be used with ATF tools.

ATF Development Tools

These are generic tools that will help the developer in creating any AJAX/DHTML type web application.

ATF Personality Framework

A Personality is a collection of IDE features that are specifically targeted to a certain AJAX Runtime Library. This is a core concept of ATF: providing an extensible framework to support AJAX development in arbitrary AJAX runtimes.

Related concepts
Getting Started


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