Today our research group had, together with some people from Uppsala Learning Lab and IML at Umeå University, a very giving all-day workshop on AJAX and the toolkit Dojo in particular. My colleague Matthias Palmér was talking first about existing approaches for realizing modern web-based applications in general and focused later on the architectures ReST and AJAX. The whole day culminated in doing some hands-on stuff, which means hacking together small applications using Dojo, just for the sake of getting a feeling for how it works or at least how it is supposed to work.
For me it was pretty new terrain. Having done some decent JavaScripts before, the “AJAX using Dojo approach” opened up a load of new possibilities on “how to do things differently” [tm]. Dojo is a powerful toolkit for simplifying such advanced web programming, and I guess I will be using it in a number of applications and prototypes. One of the first (and an important one as well) will be a web-based lightweight version of the concept browser Conzilla. Lightweight means that it will not have any editing support as we know it from the fully-featured Java application. At least not from the beginning. The main purpose will be easy and embeddable presentation of context-maps in different kinds of web documents.
Matthias already developed a prototype which is able to render context-maps directly in the browser. I’m working right now on a Restlet which supports dynamic creation of JSON-data which will be fed into the AJAX client. This will be the foundation of the web-based Conzilla client. Watch out for news on this topic!
Hannes Ebner on development and research 