GI Development
Ajax UI Design Requirements

Our first step in design is to sketch out our UI design. We start from the existing legacy JSP pages as a starting point. Since a major goal of Ajax is to provide multiple views without refreshing the entire page, we need to select a motif or theme to convey this to the user. A fairly conservative choice is a tabbed pane displayed in a standard header/body/footer layout. The table of prices we would like displayed in a sortable list. One additional requirement is to display a manageable, friendly error details tab.




GI user application architecture

Below is simplified hybrid diagram of our client application (showing only the classes, methods and properties we interact with). It is important to note that most of the files below are generated from GI Builder. The output of GI Builder is mostly XML models of GUI definitions and client-server communication processes. These models, served as .xml files from any HTTP server, are interpreted at runtime by the GI Framework so as to generate instances of GI JavaScript class objects on the client. Thus the developer's job is mainly concentrated on visually assembling GUI components then linking and orchestrating the services. One does get into JavaScript programming using the JavaScript APIs to the GI class objects for purposes of implementing client-side behaviors and interaction logic. Value adds on the client include parsing the Spring exception message and marshalling form attributes.


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