Backbase
Jouk Pleiter, CEO and Co-founder of Backbase, told me about Backbase's XML tag libraries, its new WYSIWYG Visual RIA Composer, and its foray into pre-built AJAX applications. What's different about Backbase's tag libraries, according to Pleiter, is that they are rendered on the client by the framework, in contrast with GWT, Laszlo and some other toolkits that render tags on the server to emit JavaScript for the client.

"Backbase has always offered a dual API," said Pleiter. "We hear two viewpoints about APIs: the hardcore AJAX developers want to stick to writing JavaScript, but the corporate developers think writing JavaScript is too hard and prefer working with XML tags. The XML tags are easier because they provide an abstraction layer that shields the developers from the complexities." Pleiter compared Backbase's XML tag library to the XAML used by Microsoft Silverlight and the MXML used by Adobe Flex, and suggested that having a good, stable XML tag library is a mark of a mature AJAX framework.

The Backbase Visual RIA Composer, aka Visual AJAX Builder, aka "Telamon" (see Figure 1) is currently available to early access customers. Pleiter compared this IDE to Adobe FlexBuilder and Microsoft Expression Blend. According to Pleiter, the "structured, declarative Backbase programming model" made writing the Builder relatively easy. He contrasted the functionality of "Telamon" with the support for other AJAX toolkits in Aptana: "It's not just inserting snippets; it's also debugging and doing governance. For that matter, it uses Eclipse, and is fully compatible with the Aptana plug-in."

The other major new direction for Backbase is prebuilt applications. Backbase currently offers three rich applications for "Customer Engagement 2.0": Rich Dashboard, Rich Forms, and Co-browse and Chat. According to Pleiter, these applications "bring customer-facing Web applications to the next level."

Alpha
Selwyn Rabins, Co-chairman and CTO of Alpha Software, spoke with us about his company's plans for Alpha Five V10, currently planned for the first quarter of 2009, and demonstrated some of the new features for us. Alpha, known primarily for its easy-to-use database development package, may not spring immediately to mind as an AJAX company, but the company introduced an AJAX toolkit closely tied to its XBasic programming language as part of Alpha Five V9 in March of 2008.

In Alpha Five V9, the AJAX functionality was documented by videos and by Web examples with source code, but didn't really meet Alpha's own standards for ease of development, according to Rabins. "Our consultants loved it, but it was too hard for some of our small business users, who aren't primarily developers."

Rabins agreed with Pleiter on the importance of "Builders," but not on the meaning of the term. In Alpha Five V10, producing typical AJAX database interfaces such as dynamic cascading drop-downs and dynamic tab views is much easier than it was in V9 because of the addition of Code Genies to generate the JavaScript and insert it into Web pages. But Rabins didn't think that was nearly as important as upgrading the component Builders in the product to incorporate AJAX.

In Alpha Five, a Builder, for example the Grid Builder of which a part is shown in Figure 2, defines the properties of a major component and ties it to a database, using a property-sheet interface rather than a drag-and-drop visual interface. In the figure, the database happens to be the Microsoft Northwind sample. The grid component is added to a Web page in a separate step that is visual; the Builder can be rerun at any time to change the properties of the grid.

"Builders are the key to AJAX in Alpha Five V10," said Rabins. "An application developer doesn't need to know anything about AJAX to produce an AJAX -enabled component: all he has to do is to set a few properties in the Builder to achieve the desired effects."

Rabins felt that, over the last year or two, end users have developed higher expectations for browser applications. "In fact, dynamic HTML turns out to be a wonderful tool for creating the user interface of an application. It's just too hard for casual developers: most of our application developers will never want to use a JavaScript library directly. Our developers need to focus on what they are building, not how to build it."

Rabins praised Microsoft Silverlight, saying that it offers even more capabilities than DHTML, but said that those capabilities are "unnecessary for database applications. The backbone of CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) database applications is the grid."

So, consider the grid shown in Figure 3. Notice that the top row has a Query by Example bar that allows you to do complex searching on the grid. Notice also that the Grid has a Detail View. When the Detail View is opened, it is opened in the Grid itself (rather than under the grid), directly under the appropriate row.

Both of these capabilities are new to the AJAX-ified Alpha grid control, and in some ways exceed the capabilities of Alpha's desktop interface. Other new capabilities of this grid that take advantage of AJAX include allowing the Detail View to float; all-rows or row-on-demand editing; incremental saves of dirty rows; immediate field verification; a quick search in the current sort column; dynamic drop-down choices for searches; and incremental filtering.

The key point, according to Rabins, is that "all of this is available without writing a line of code, or knowing anything about the DOM." All of these capabilities are simply configuration options in the Builder.

Rabins promises several other new features for v10. One of the most exciting is an import facility for HTML wireframes. "Suppose you have a Web designer who has produced a page with HTML forms, using Adobe Dreamweaver or Microsoft Expression Web. Of course, the wireframe doesn't know how to talk to the database, so it doesn't really do anything. As a developer, you don't want to have to write code to tie each form field to a database field by hand. What we've done is to automate that: you can define a database connection, and then map the form fields to the database fields graphically. Then you can map buttons to actions, define form validation rules, and finally let the program generate all the XBasic code for the server and the JavaScript AJAX callbacks for the client."

So, choices abound for AJAX development, and more choices are in the offing. Finding good AJAX options in 2009 should be easy. Making the choices, though, might be hard.