July 26th, 2005

Join us this month as we hear from Dan Gisolfi and Laurent Hasson from IBM on building rich internet applications with a reusable and accessible JavaScript framework.

At our May meeting Jay Sheth introduced us to the concepts of building rich enterprise applications with Mozilla, AMP, XML-RPC and JSON. Yet XUL does not offer an adequate RIA solution across all browsers and it is not a zero-footprint based solution. JavaScript represents a common cross browser technology to enable rich yet lightweight web applications. IBM has developed a very extensive Rich Browser Framework which uses JavaScript to implement a Client-side MVC Architecture. The framework supports:
  • A Distributed Data Model
  • A library of Reusable and Accessible UI Controls
  • A JavaScript Event Model to bind the model, view and controller together
  • A JavaScript Communications Library that supports Ajax, Web Services and Web Messaging

IBM's framework was developed as part of their IBM Rational tooling for JSF. At this time IBM has separated the framework from the Java Tooling and is considering contributing it or similar technology to an open source community for use by Java and PHP developers alike. A key motivation for open sourcing a JavaScript framework is to introduce a reusable library of accessible UI widgets that implement the DHTML Accessibility technology outlined at: www.mozilla.org/access/dhtml.

The presenters will cover:
  • Framework overview
  • Standalone Code demonstration using just the JavaScript Framework
  • Demonstration of Accessible Widgets using Mozilla Firefox 1.1+ and GW-Micro's Window-Eyes 5.0 Beta
  • Code demo using complete end-2-end Java development solution
  • Code demo using framework with a PHP data mediator
  • Open Discussion on value and community interest in an open source JavaScript Widget library

For related reading prior to the meeting check out these links:
  • FacesClient Developer's Guide
  • Banking Application Example
  • SDO v2.

For a trial version of Rational Application Developer V6 and IBM's implementation
of JSF which embeds JSL (In short, access to the cool JavaScript) visit:

• http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/downloads/r/rad

Dan Gisolfi has posted a bunch of links that might be useful:

• http://lists.nyphp.org/pipermail/talk/2005-July/015628.html


• http://lists.nyphp.org/pipermail/talk/2005-July/015629.html

Thanks to IBM for providing a great presentation space with seating for plenty.

As a service to our community, New York PHP User Group meetings are always free and open to the public.