Session D307 : Atlas / Ajax
Probably the most declarative session of the day…
Christine Dubois started his presentation with a little formula : AJAX + ASP.NET 2.0 = Atlas. In fact, AJAX is not specific to Microsoft and ASP.NET and is available on almost every platform. AJAX means Asynchronous Javascript And XML. In our days, web applications suffer of the lack of richness in their user interface and although it is possible to add cool but basic features like drag-and-drop by adding a lot Javascript, it is still a pain to code in that language, without speaking about the debugging. Moreover, on the .Net side, using the paging and sorting features of a datagrid requires a complete round-trip to the web server. That is why AJAX and Atlas are born.
To start, Atlas offers a complete framework intended to be used on the client-side as well as on the server-side of a web application. For the drag-and-drop example, the Javascript code needed – and no more – to be on the client is downloaded to support this feature. It is already written for you and the only thing to do is to add an Atlas control to you aspx page.
She also showed us an example of the use of the Intellisense on the client-side. For this, the client needs to access data and it is possible to the client-side code to call a web service to get the data. Furthermore, by adding /js to the web service Url you can directly download the Javascript code that is able to connect to your web service.
Regarding the paging and sorting issue, the way Ajax address this is by requesting, with XmlHttpRequest, the strict needed data. This means that only the differences with the previous version of the page are downloaded from the server. On the other hand, all demos were done using only declarative programming style which I can not agree with…
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