Backbase Newsletter - December 2007

Dear ${Demographic.FirstName},

From all of us here at Backbase, I’d like to wish you Happy Holidays! We wish all the best to you, your family, your business and to your Ajax projects. Even though holiday season is coming up, there’s still a lot of Ajax news: see the articles below. At Backbase we’ve just release Enterprise Ajax 4.1.2, which is now available for download.

Download Enterprise Ajax 4.1.2 »

This year we introduced with great success the online Ajax Training - it sold out each and every time. The new training was immediately followed with numerous requests for an online Backbase training. So with the New Year, we will introduce "Learn Backbase is 10 hours, an Introduction to the Enterprise Ajax framework." We will introduce additional online Ajax Training courses throughout 2008 so stay tuned.

Best regards,
Jouk Pleiter
CEO, Backbase

Today we released Backbase Enterprise Ajax 4.1.2, which includes several improvements, including a new SOAP API, improved form validation, several new widgets, new Debugger features, improved data binding, performance increases, and enhanced documentation. The documentation includes revised manuals, improved API references and over a dozen new Example Pages. For more info, see the 'what's new' article on the Backbase Developer Network. To download, please visit our website.

Last week Ajaxian and Burton Group’s Richard Monson-Haefel conducted a survey amongst Ajax developers. It showed that more and more developers are using Ajax frameworks instead of hand-coding Ajax. Although the total number of frameworks has increased, there is a limited number of frameworks that is really popular. Backbase is by far the most popular commercial framework. We also made a short analysis of the results.

One year after the release of Internet Explorer 7 the first information about IE8 has been published: on the IE weblog it was announced that it will be called IE8 (not a surprise, really). It’s still unknown which features will be included, but it’s clear that Microsoft is listening carefully to the needs of web developers. They are also feeling the heat from Opera, which has sued Microsoft over proprietary features in IE. However, based on our own web statistics and those of W3Schools, it seems that IE6 is still more popular than IE7, so unfortunately it will take a while before we can optimize applications for IE7, let alone IE8.

Backbase Example Pages have been introduced with Backbase 4.1 to provide a more interactive type of documentation. With 4.1.2 several more example pages have been created, for example about SOAP, data binding, data grids, animation and the debugger. Take a look and let us know what you think at bdn@backbase.com.

The OpenAjax Hub is a set of standard JavaScript functionality that ensures that multiple Ajax libraries can be used within the same web page. This week the final 1.0 specification was approved by the OpenAjax members. This is the first specification to come out of The OpenAjax Alliance, which is a major milestone towards standardization of Ajax.

The Ajax Training is our most popular training offering: in 10 hours we teach the fundamentals of Ajax, after which you can move on to more advanced topics. It takes place every month, and the next training is scheduled for January 28-30. In addition, we have introduced a new 10-hour Backbase Enterprise Ajax training, which focuses on the Backbase Ajax framework fundamentals: next class starts February 11th. For more info, contact us at sales-us@backbase.com.

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Last month Ryan Stewart wrote a good article that addresses the question of "what drives adoption of Rich Internet Applications"? That's a different question from "what can RIA be used for?", which was answered very well in 2006 by Dietrich Kappe on the Agile Ajax blog. Where Dietrich lists types of projects that can make good use RIA and Ajax, Ryan focuses on the compelling reasons to start using it. He emphasizes that RIA features are now finding their way into traditional software, so developers have more choice picking and choosing the RIA technologies that fit their needs.

As an alternative for using the FusionCharts Flash-based charts you can now also use the Google Chart API to generate image-based charts. You just construct a URL with the chart data and configuration encoded in the URL variables and you’re done. Jon Winstanley created a wizard to quickly generate these URL, which is a real time-saver. The only limitation is the number of queries, which is limited to 50,000 a day.