Business Benefits

Improve the User Experience

Backbase creates compelling, attractive Web applications that simplify communication, generate leads, increase sales, increase loyalty, improve service and deepen the customer relationship.

Simplify Online Processes

Simplify typically complex processes like registration, product configuration and information search and retrieval resulting in significantly higher levels of visitor satisfaction and online revenues.

Reduce the Time-to-Market

Backbase offers 'out-of-the-box' Rich User Interface solutions that enables you to create new user interfaces in a very short time frame.

Technical Benefits

Increase Developer Productivity

Backbase helps to maximize the productivity of developers — from novice to expert — through a powerful Ajax UI engine, pre-built Ajax UI widgets and Ajax development tools, including a plug-in for Eclipse. The Backbase Ajax framework takes care of all the RIA plumbing functions, enabling developers to concentrate on business requirements.

Lower Total Cost of Ownership

Backbase offers a zero-install technology that enables an effortless roll-out of an application throughout the organization and to external users. Backbase RIAs are seamlessly instantiated within the end-users web browser. Backbase solutions easily integrate into your IT environment, allowing you to leverage existing software assets.

Future-proof investment

Backbase is based on open standards (W3C) and offers a flexible programming model.

Leverage existing IT systems

Backbase solutions easily integrate into your IT infrastructure, allowing you to leverage existing software assets. These integrations are based on industry standards such as XML, Java and Web Services.

10 reasons to use the Backbase Enterprise Ajax Platform

Rich Client Framework

The Client Framework includes a small footprint Ajax Engine that is like an application server that runs in the browser. Big differences between browsers can make Ajax development challenging: the Client Framework solves these challenges with an abstraction layer: With Backbase, a widget or function will work the same across all browsers. The object oriented nature of the framework ensures well-organized and maintainable code.

How does the engine work?

The Ajax Engine provides an API to allow requests for services. By calling methods and properties and passing arguments as defined by the API, developers can leverage the built-in flexibility and focus on the functionality of their application. The engine provides a dual API; a declarative API and a JavaScript API so tasks can be performed either through XML command functions, through JavaScript, or a mix of the two.

Enterprise Ajax Widgets

Backbase Enterprise Ajax includes the most complete component library with over 250 pre-built widgets and functions. You can create your own custom Widgets or add any 3rd party widgets. Multiple skins are available, and custom skins are easy to make. View live examples in the Backbase Ajax Explorer » Client-Side Widgets are built in XHTML, CSS, JavaScript and XML, and can be used anywhere on the web page. Ajax JSF Components contains a JSF wrapper around the client-side Widgets, using JSF’s server-side component model.

Custom widgets

Custom widgets can be created by adjusting pre-built widgets or by building widgets from scratch. With Backbase you are not stuck with rigid single purpose widgets; rather, you can create any UI control you need.

Yahoo UI Color Picker Widget

Google Map Component

Yahoo UI Rich Text Editor Widget

Charts from FusionCharts

Real-time Debugging

Backbase Enterprise Ajax provides real-time debugging directly within the web browser. With this debugger, developers can debug their code in the context of the application they are creating. It's similar to Firebug, but specific to Ajax development, and it works in all browsers. It simply takes the guesswork out of Ajax development.

Ajax Portal Connector for JSR-168 and WSRP

More and more companies have leveraged to power of portal servers to create highly personalized intranets and web applications. Portal servers provide many useful features, such as personalization, single sign-on, and integration with 3rd party portlets. However, the user experience is often plagued by long wait times, because every action results in a complete page refresh. To compare: desktop applications are more responsive and do not refresh the entire screen after a mouse-click. Add Backbase to a portal and you get similar benefits: no more screen refreshes, and much improved response times.

Backbase Enterprise Ajax with the Portal Connector enables you to create JSR-168 compliant portlets that do not require your portal page to re-render all portlets after each operation and also offers over 250 Ajax widgets and functions that simplify the development of your "ajaxified" portlets. The concept of the Portal Connector is that we want to avoid as many page refreshes as possible when interacting with a portlet. We’re using the WSRP protocol and JSR-168. To avoid page refreshes, we avoid rerunning the portlet class, because that would cause the entire portal page to refresh. So the main thing we do in an Ajax portlet is to dispatch to a view. When you need other functionality such as editing portlet preferences, you can define other JSR168 defined methods (like processAction) to take care of this.

Code Samples and Starter Kits

The hundreds of code samples in the Backbase Ajax Explorer can be used to learn the technology and quickly assemble feature-rich Ajax applications. The bundled Starter Kits show best practices for RIA development. They can be used as a starting point for your own applications, or simply as a source of inspiration.

Extensive Documentation

Enterprise Ajax comes with a beginner tutorial, a complete API reference, an application development manual and a dedicated manual for Widget development. The Backbase Developer Network connects you to an active developer community, and contains additional articles with code samples and best practices. You can also find the full product documentation on the BDN

Enterprise Ajax - System Requirements