Dev - Kabuki AJAX toolkit

[Chris Juettner]

Hello,
I have reviewed a couple of previous threads relating to the use of Ajax
in OFBIZ and have not really found any real discussion as to the feasibility
of applying the Ajax concepts to OFBIZ.  I am working with an application
that was built using the OFBIZ architecture as the underlying platform and
have been tasked with analyzing how to possibly use Ajax to enhance the
user experience.

I saw a post from David that stated it might be interesting to look into
the new Apache incubator Ajax project client library.  I think David was
talking about the Kubuki project which originated from Zimbra. From their
website "Zimbra is a founding member as well as a key technology contributor
to the newly inaugurated Open Ajax Initiative. The goal of Open Ajax is
to make the delivery of rich Ajax user interfaces substantially easier than
it has been."  

I am going to look into the Kabuki Ajax Toolkit for our use and would like
to get input from the community as to what features and capabilities this
toolkit provides that may make it a candidate for use by OFBIZ. I've only
been working with OFBIZ for five months now, so your insight and experience
will be appreciated.

One feature I'm looking into providing in our application is form field
validation (maybe configurable like Struts Validator) and/or search screens.

Chris Juettner
Integral Business Solutions







 
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[David E. Jones]

Chris,

Yes, Kabuki is the one I was referring to. I'm not very familiar with  
the project (haven't looked into it much).

The interesting thing about these various AJAX tool kits is that they  
all seem to have some sort of different set of widgets or controls to  
do different things. There are a lot of these things that could  
potentially be used in OFBiz, and in a way this is pretty tricky. We  
could end up with a few different AJAX tool kits in used in OFBiz,  
and while I don't think that's a bad thing, I also hope there isn't  
too much overlap or redundancy that makes things less efficient to  
maintain.

But anyway, there are quite a few places for the tools mentioned that  
they could be used in the form widget, tree widget, and menu widget.  
In addition to these lots of things could be used in more custom  
templates (FTL files) for more "rich" and purpose-specific pages.

Form field validation in the client would be nice. I'm not sure if  
AJAX is required for this except in certain cases where there is too  
much data to validate against and sending this to the client wouldn't  
work so well. This will take some work to implement, but a lot of  
validation information is available in service and entity definitions  
(field sizes, required or not, data type, etc), and more could be  
added to the form widget or something (though this would mean  
validation in more than one place because it also must happen in the  
service, ie for things that aren't constrained in the service  
definition but rather in the implementation).

For searching I've seen mention of some cool things in other tools  
like dynamic result tables that can scroll around getting data as  
needed from the server and such. That would be a nice addition to the  
current functionality based on the Find and ListFind form pattern  
that currently is used for static results and pagination and such.

-David


On Mar 1, 2006, at 8:17 AM, [hidden email] wrote:

> Hello,
> I have reviewed a couple of previous threads relating to the use of  
> Ajax
> in OFBIZ and have not really found any real discussion as to the  
> feasibility
> of applying the Ajax concepts to OFBIZ.  I am working with an  
> application
> that was built using the OFBIZ architecture as the underlying  
> platform and
> have been tasked with analyzing how to possibly use Ajax to enhance  
> the
> user experience.
>
> I saw a post from David that stated it might be interesting to look  
> into
> the new Apache incubator Ajax project client library.  I think  
> David was
> talking about the Kubuki project which originated from Zimbra. From  
> their
> website "Zimbra is a founding member as well as a key technology  
> contributor
> to the newly inaugurated Open Ajax Initiative. The goal of Open  
> Ajax is
> to make the delivery of rich Ajax user interfaces substantially  
> easier than
> it has been."
>
> I am going to look into the Kabuki Ajax Toolkit for our use and  
> would like
> to get input from the community as to what features and  
> capabilities this
> toolkit provides that may make it a candidate for use by OFBIZ.  
> I've only
> been working with OFBIZ for five months now, so your insight and  
> experience
> will be appreciated.
>
> One feature I'm looking into providing in our application is form  
> field
> validation (maybe configurable like Struts Validator) and/or search  
> screens.
>
> Chris Juettner
> Integral Business Solutions
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Dev mailing list
> [hidden email]
> http://lists.ofbiz.org/mailman/listinfo/dev

 
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