2008/06/13

SpringOne 2008 - Decorating Web Pages with AJAX using Spring JavaScript by Jeremy Grelle

Spring JS provides a javascript layer above Dojo. The Dojo javascript files are provided by Spring JS in a gzipped format. The dojo-integration is pluggable and will be enhanced with other javascript tool sets (e.g. jQuery).

The basic idea is to start from a fully-functional 'classical' webapp and progressively enhance the application with AJAX. But: even with javascript disabled, the page must remain functional, degrading back to it's basic behavior - really interesting, since I'm a big noscript fan :-). The Ajax page-elements are defined with Apache Tiles and served as a whole or through fragments depending on the request-type. WebFlow support serving separate 'fragments' in one state to allow for example pagination without page-refresh.

Spring JS also provides a basic CSS from Mike Stenhouse that provides a good basic look and feel that can be easily overridden.

The Spring JS provides a JavaScript syntax to enhance existing page elements with e.g. client-side validation, tool tips or partial page-refreshes. Again, the idea is that even without Javascript, the page is still OK.

No comments: