Two tools to bring Ajax into Eclipse's Ajax Toolkit Framework

IBM is committed to launching the new Open Ajax initiative in the hope of adding support for powerful WEB programming technologies through Eclipse Foundation. To help developers prepare for the new toolset, this article describes two existing runtime tools Dojo and Zimbra that will be supported by the Ajax Toolkit Framework (ATF) in Eclipse.

The partners behind open asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) initiative are strengthening communities by building an open platform that developers can collaborate on. Founding members of initiative, including BEA Systems, Borland Software, the Dojo Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, Google, IBM, Laszlo Systems , Mozilla, Novell, Openwave Systems, Oracle, Red Hat, Yahoo!, Zend Technologies and Zimbra, aware of the great importance of introducing new tools into the growing Ajax community of developers. Initiative puts a wide range of tools in the hands of people who are building a responsive user interface (UI) into a new environment and an existing environment. The unified interface and advanced debugging capabilities in Eclipse bring an enterprise-level coding environment to the community. The Eclipse's ATF will provide easy access to the toolkit from Dojo and Zimbra.

Initiative members believe that the main backing of Open Ajax could be the tipping point of the message that it drives the WEB in which it still has vitality. Open Ajax Initiative is making a positive effort for the health of the Web.

Note: See Resources for a newsletter explaining Open Ajax initiative.

Eclipse ATF

Eclipse Foundation has become a beacon of open source development and a powerful application framework. Eclipse is a Java™-based open source platform that can be fully scaled and deployed on every major platform. A wide range of plug-ins and tools are available.

As part of the Open Ajax initiative, the Eclipse Foundation is building a ATF that will provide an extensible framework for run-time environments such as Dojo and Zimbra. As part of the Open Ajax initiative, ATF plays the role of a central component unified tool. An earlier version of ATF is available from IBM Alphaworks (see Resources).

Based on the Eclipse WEB tools PROJECT,ATF provides tools for building the stand-alone development environment (IDE), including run-time syntax checking, and embedding the JavaScript debugger, Document Object Model (DOM) browser, and M Ozilla Web Browser. ATF provides a complete enterprise-style development environment for traditional, loosely-developed open source development tools, and many developers feel comfortable working in the environment. This tutorial focuses on Dojo and Zimbra, because they are the two most capable and mature Ajax tools available today. Figure 1 shows the components of the initiative and how the ATF is assembled.

Figure 1. Open Ajax Initiative Components

Dojo

If you plan to take the tools used in Open Ajax initiative, you should be familiar with the toolkits that ATF will support, such as Dojo and Zimbra.

Dojo is a community project designed to unify JavaScript and Dynamic hypertext Markup Language (DHTML) efforts in a single direction by building standard JavaScript libraries. The community realizes that without the cooperation of the people will not go too far, so three independent predecessors toolkit is unified into the Dojo Foundation, which owns and maintains the code. Dojo has multiple optional packages, including Ajax, I/O, and "Kitchen Sink" versions (which include the entire collection of tools).

Getting Started Dojo simply downloads one of the following five versions:

Ajax-uses an Ajax version to create applications with synchronous I/O (XmlHttp), integrates complex visual effects, and uses aspect-oriented event systems. The I/O (XmlHttp)-i/o version is built with Dojo.io.bind, so the XmlHttp layer can be used for asynchronous I/O. Event + i/o-This version includes Dojo's aspect-oriented event system and the XmlHttp layer. widgets-This release includes the ability to implement loosely coupled HTML and cascading style Sheet (CSS) templates with widgets, providing a clear separation of styles, content, and logic. Kitchen sink-This version includes all Dojo libraries.