Problem still remains

For enterprise builders Ajax solved many problem of responsiveness of UI but problem of overall development methodologies using Ajax still remains with lot of contradictions and conflicts among the developers. When using Ajax in an Enterprise Application main problem faced by the developers are where to start and how to start. The major problem faced by the enterprise developers and architect in implementing Ajax based UI solutions in existing application.

No software solution is beyond the scope of SDLC actually, but in general found missing when implementing Ajax based solutions in an enterprise app. Ajax by nature has some tremendous side effects if practiced unethically (from SDLC perspective) and by overuse.

Where is the Silver bullet?

In Ajax oriented solutions there is no silver bullet till date. Ajax is not a technology it’s more of a technique. And the success of Ajax oriented approach depends upon the proper study of requirements. If you take wrong move at beginning you tend to suffer in later stage of your development cycle.

There is no short cut at all in development of Ajax oriented Rich UI based presentation layer development, it’s a full blown development cycle. Yes there are many toolkit, utilities, tag-libraries to help you develop Rich UI which is Ajax based but development effort of front end, server side code and architecture re-aligning is always be there to be estimated.

Where to start?

As I mentioned before, prior to know where to start and how start better you should know what to do first and your user expectations you are going to meet. Define the scope of Ajax based UI and usability options you are going to provide to your end-users.

But again to remind you that there is no silver bullet which can provide you hassle free Rich UI development in a minutes/hours for enterprise app. It needs extensive planning; architecting and testing that age-old mantra for developing Aax based Rich UI for enterprise app.

In Ajax based approach there are two pattern in development; Dom Manipulation and Partial Updation. Stuts2(Webworks2+) promised to provide some inbuilt features for both of them. But as of now in struts, up to 1.2.9 (I have evaluated up to this version of1.2.x) there are no Ajax materials to help.

So depending on the pattern you are going to use in your enterprise app you have to decide and design accordingly to develop your RUI.

To help your development of Ajax RUI you can use DWR, Dojo toolkit and SCRIPTACULOUS (All based upon prototype lib), Yahoo UI library is good enough to get some readymade widgets out of the box. But you are the person who will be the king of your Ajax app because of your customized need of your very own RUI.

Do not hesitate to take help from ajaxpattern.org for taking right design decision to negate the future disasters as I mentioned earlier.

If you have framed the scope of your UI enhancement try using Ajaxanywhere tag-library, it is really a good one and can shorten your development time in very effective way. Using pre-build Ajax tag-library can really reduce the development efforts, and there are so many to do so. Check out the resource section for that.

Check the first part of this article here