Nexablog

Everyone,

Last night we finally got all the pieces to the dojo.E release finished and it is now online. There is quite a few things new in this release of dojo.E. We are also now making it possible to get the dojo.E code with the IMB, EDS and Nexaweb Server right from the dojo.E site.  This is exciting because you can get started with dojo.E and IMB by download a simple zip file.

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I just presented a tutorial on Friday on using Direct Web Remoting, Hibernate and dojo.E.  It’s a very simple demo, but demonstrates the power of these three technologies combined to create simple, dynamic Java applications very quickly. The tutorial is available on SlideShare.

Note that there is a bug that obscures the URL for the SVN project.  The URL is http://source.nexaweb.com/svn/repos/trunk/tutorials/ajax/DWRExample/.

You can check out the project via SVN using this URL.

Also, to copy and paste the code snippets, download the document and open directly in PowerPoint. When copying and pasting, watch out for “smart quotes”. Some of the quotation characters in the PPT have been replaced with “smart quotes”, which are not recognized by XML parsers.

This will get even more exciting with the new features of DWR 3.0, which will add a RESTful layer to DWR’s remoting.  To learn more about DWR 3.0, I recommend Joe Walker’s presentation from The Ajax Experience last week.  He’s the lead developer for DWR.

Joel Barciauskas

Google Chrome is only about three weeks old and is already an Internet phenomenon. To sum it up, Google Chrome is all about making web browsing safer, faster, and easier. While some might see a fierce competition between Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, I see harmony.

Here is some background to better understand this point of view. There has been a somewhat valid belief stating that the un-typed and interpreted nature of the JavaScript language was a major limitation for building demanding client applications. Consequently, to overcome this challenge, the browser technology providers had the following two options:

1. Re-invent the language by “upgrading” the JavaScript language to a more a traditional typed and object-oriented language, such as Java or C#, allowing the runtime to just focus on running the code.
2. Re-invent the runtime by creating novels ways for the JavaScript virtual machine to parse and interpret the JavaScript code, making the language as robust and reliable as more traditional languages.

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Just finished checking in the last of the updates (minus bug fixes) for the new Ajax IMB Client, after a week of straight coding and little else. The new version has been completely rewritten from the ground up. This coincides with Nexaweb’s upcoming release (in a month or so) of an updated version of the Ajax Client. The Ajax Client codebase will be completely updated and run over dojo 1.2. All the coding for these updates follow six principles:

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One of the goals of the dojo.E project has been to bring some of the standards created by the W3C and others to developers for building their Ajax applications. A couple of weeks ago, I saw on Ajaxian.com that Firefox and Webkit are going to support XBL. Simply defined, the XML Binding Language or XBL is a way to create reusable components.

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Charting is one of the more advanced components that an application developer has at their disposal. It may not be used in every application but it probably could be and should be. Why? Charting makes the consumption of larges amounts of data easier and quicker than their tabular counterparts. In the Web world there are a couple of ways to bring charting to your Ajax application.

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Over the last few months Nexaweb has been working on the dojo.E project and we just released the first version. dojo.E is designed to be a small JavaScript library that developers use in conjunction with the dojo toolkit. Completely open source the library is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.

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One thing we preach at Nexaweb more than any other is that no one technology / language / runtime… can solve all your needs. As I like to say, “It takes a village” of software technologies to raise your application from an idea to a production application.

Last week one of our Services people came to me and asked, “How would you upload a file using the Nexaweb Java Client?” At first I thought just use the Java Client and open up a file dialog. Then I remembered that under normal circumstances Java creates a very secure environment to run your applications. This “Sandbox” makes it impossible for applications that are not signed to access local resources.

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We’ve been working hard on a new version of our development environment and we’re releasing a beta into the world.

Some highlights:

1. Data, data, data - all work flows that interact with data integration have been overhauled
2. Supporting users that have their own Eclipse environment and don’t want ours
3. Editing our “macros” - declarative modification blocks that can be executed on the client
4. Supporting JSON visualization for data sources
5. Results from usability testing has been added in
6. and more…

If you would like to take the beta for a spin, email our support department.

Rob Gagne

Over in the articles sections of the Nexaweb devcenter section I just finished creating a new entry describing how to Create a plugin for our Ajax client. One of the things that people can take advantage of in Nexaweb’s client architecture is the ability to integrate any third party component of any type (Flash, Ajax, HTML, Java, SilverLight) into their application. Flexibility is a fundamental design philosophy of Nexaweb or what we call a “Pillar of Development”.

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