Backbase Newsletter - October 2007

Dear ${Demographic.FirstName},

On Monday we have our next Ajax training: it’s an online, instructor-led training, which covers all Ajax fundamentals in 10 hours. It’s very hands-on and it covers JavaScript, XML, advanced CSS and much more.

Sign up for the Ajax Training »

Do you want help with your Ajax project? That’s also possible: we provide a complete range of Ajax Consulting services, such as interaction design, architecture, prototyping, development and security.

After a successful launch of Backbase Enterprise Ajax 4, we continue to work on new innovative products: we invite you to join the early access program for our upcoming Visual Ajax Builder. We’re looking forward to your feedback.

And if you’re already busy developing with Backbase: we also have fresh articles on the Backbase Developer Network (BDN), and several interesting Ajax articles below.

Best regards,
Jouk Pleiter
CEO, Backbase

Joel Spolsky – the man behind the highly-regarded ‘Joel on Software’ weblog - recently made the case for Ajax frameworks based on analogies between Ajax and key events in the history of computing. For example, he compares CICS mainframes to HTML pages and current Ajax development to non-standardized early PC applications, such as WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3. Then Windows and Macintosh became popular, providing a standard and consistent user interface. He expects that Ajax SDKs will do the same: provide some standardization of Ajax user interfaces, resulting in increased usability. He makes other interesting analogies that are worth a read.

The Google Gears browser plug-in makes Ajax applications available off-line. The plug-in caches entire web pages locally and stores application data on the client in a fully-searchable relational database. Backbase has a published a Google Gears example in which a timestamp is stored in the Gears database. The community has also contributed enhancements, such as the Vortex offline library.

Firebug is a plug-in for Firefox that has a wealth of development tools built in. It is a great add-on for Backbase development tools. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. The Firebug website has links to some useful webcasts and tutorials and Phil Rees recently published a tutorial that looks at Firebug tools for CSS, Ajax calls, JavaScript, and JavaScript profiling.

At the Future of Web Apps conference, Mozilla evangelist John Resig made a plea for standards-based Rich Internet Applications. Tim Anderson created a write-up on his blog: “It was a fascinating presentation which demonstrated that it is not just Adobe (Flash, AIR), Microsoft (Silverlight) and Sun (JavaFX) who are in the Rich Internet Application game.” John discusses enhancements for Firefox, including HTML 5, OpenGL and SVG, and talks about Webrunner, a desktop RIA runtime.

In an earlier newsletter we wrote about Yahoo’s rules to speed up web applications and the YSlow performance testing tool. It’s time for an update: the 13 rules have become 14, and they’ve added a lot of detail and suggestions for improvement. Follow these rules, and your Ajax application could load up to 5 times faster. If you want to read more about it, consider buying the book High Performance Web Sites, written by Yahoo’s Chief Performance Officer.

Through a partnership agreement we have made 20 attractive charts available for all Backbase developers. You can add these animated Flash charts to your Ajax based web applications with a simple XML tag. You can read more about this on the Backbase Developer Network (BDN).

When creating Mashup applications, you are loading data from different servers and combining it into a single user interface. However, the browser’s cross-domain security model does not allow loading data from different domains. There is a workaround that uses dynamically generated script-tags, but this is considered unsafe, so many Mashup applications use a server-side proxy. JSONRequest provides a solution, but needs a browser plug-in or native browser implementation. Kris Zyp has implemented a subset of JSONRequest in JavaScript-only, in a library called CrossSafe. Not as safe as going via the server, but a big improvement over plain dynamic script tags.

Large-scale web applications typically use load balancing on the server for better performance and for fail-over. However, this setup is expensive and complex. Lei Zhu found a way to use Ajax for load balancing: the client application has a list of servers and randomly connects to one of them. If the server doesn’t respond it will try the next server. He uses this with Amazon’s EC2 elastic computing cloud, an on-demand data center that normally doesn’t support full fail-over.