Developing Ajax Applications with Java EE using JavaScript

This course introduces the Ajax programming model for web applications, and guides Java developers through the sometimes bewildering array of approaches to adding Ajax functionality into their web applications.We start with a tour of basic browser programming, using JavaScript, the HTML DOM, and CSS. Then, students learn how to establish communication between their on-page JavaScripts and server-side application components, and thus to develop richer, more user-friendly and responsive web applications. We pursue Ajax connectivity entirely from the client side in this first module, at several levels. From an initial study of the bare-bones approach using the XMLHttpRequest browser object, we move on to consider programming techniques for thread safety, and use of higher-level script libraries such as Prototype and Dojo. We then look at two of the dominant forms of Ajax framework: the RMI approach, and JSF component libraries. For each class of tool we investigate two popular options DWR and jabsorb; RichFaces and Trinidad and use that comparison to discover the broader architectural patterns of that approach.