Jim Driscoll's Blog

Sun, AJAX and JavaScript

Sun started working on a lot of AJAX things about a year ago. As the manager for the Java Web Tier, that meant that I was pretty involved with most of the work we're doing. But for the most part, we kept quiet - in large part because we don't like to preannounce things.

Well, we're now far enough along to talk about things - there' quite a few different things in particular that we've announced this week that merit special attention:

The old standard of the Blueprints Petstore has gotten a new look, in the new Java Petstore 2.0 EA - with lots of AJAXey goodness. If you haven't checked it out yet, you should. The Blueprints guys have also been working hard on all getting out all kinds of AJAX related information, including a nifty set of JSF AJAX components, that are also usable in Java Studio Creator...

But of course, that's not all - Project jMaki is a really neat wrapping technology (Maki is "wrap" in Japanese) that takes JavaScript widgets and puts them inside JSP and JSF tags in a really simple way - and Greg's got a bunch of components aready done - check it out - there's support for Dojo, Scriptaculus, Yahoo UI Widgets and DHTML Goodies.

There's also JSF Dyamnic Updating - this is a JSF extension library which divides the page into zones, and allows partial updating of pages through these zones.

Lastly, who says JavaScript needs to just be on the client? Project Phobos is a framework to allow scripting on the server side. And since there's native support for JavaScript in Rhino in Mustang, JavaScript is supported out of the box in Phobos - it's really interesting, check it out.

And of course, there's more on the way - watch our main AJAX page to hear more.

Comments

• I hope Sun will not ignore Jakarta's Bean Scripting Framework (http://jakarta.apache.org/bsf/index.html) which I think is an elegant way to expose server-side applications to a variety of scripting languages, including JavaScript, Python, and TCL.

  Posted by: cloder on May 23, 2006 at 08:19 AM

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