Another Entry, Another Hype

Hi guys!

I´m going to share with you some technical stuff about Ajax. And the reason is that I´ve been working lately a lot with it, because you know, these days you just can´t use a standard dropdown, you need an ajax driven dropdown or a web 2.0 dropdown.

I suppose you know what Ajax is, if not check out this link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_%28programming%29. (where have you been, in the Lost Island?, by the way I´ve got a crazy theory that I´ll share with you :) )

Generally speaking, Ajax components could improve the user experience, if correctly used. For example the live search component, or the google search, I´m sure you know it; you just type some characters and the result appears without refreshing the page. You go on typing and more results appear.

This component could save a lot of time and pain in a web application, I´ve used it to replace a conventional search (yes, with a pop up and pagination buttons, oh my!), replacing the manual pagination through hundreds of results for a simple search box. You just type a 3 o more chars and the results appear in DIV, under the box or next to it. Even you can have links inside the results!.

So what I will do it´s explain to you how to integrate a Live Search component in your application using different frameworks and components.

Ok, let´s have a look at the frameworks then. There are many of them, almost every software company has one, it´s the sign of the times. I´ll talk about the ones I know and I have used:

- YUI (Yahoo User Interface): http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/.

- DWR (Direct Web Remoting): http://getahead.org/dwr.

- GWT (Google Web Toolkit): http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/.

- Moo.Fx : http://moofx.mad4milk.net.

- Rico: http://openrico.org/rico/home.page.

I´ll start with the YUI framework and the integration of the YUI live seach component with Struts, JSF and Spring MVC. That will be in the next entry.

See you!