jQuery and GX WebManager

In GX WebManager 9.7 we introduced a lot of nice platform features such as the integrated Rich Experience Engine. This is a fancy name for integrated support for AJAX frameworks such as jQuery. We changed and added several things in GX WebManager to offer better integration points for example forms, discussions, poll updates and dashboard functionality. Our main goal was to offer this RIA functionality in our product, not by offering example WCBs and hacks. And I think we succeeded quite nicely: anyone can download our Community Edition and witness the result: it contains rich forms, widgets, a customizable dashboard and fancy bells and whistles such as a Lightbox like presentation and animated poll. Here's a small video I created that shows the customizable dashboard... (I'm sorry no soundtrack & SFX)

Full-blown RIA vs. lightweight client side framework

When looking at the market you can see a clear diversion between full RIA solutions such as JavaFX, Flex, Adobe AIR, Backbase and Silverlight and backend independent javascript libraries such as jQuery, Prototype and Dojo. Personally I expected these frameworks to consolidate more over the last 2 years, but the opposite has happened: RIA solutions have grown to be even more bulkier including dependencies on proprietary clients (Flash, Silverlight) and server components (JavaFX, Adobe AIR). On the opposite side Javascript frameworks focused on keeping a very small footprint and embedding simple plugin structures (jQuery).

From a CMS perspective

Both types of AJAX/RIA frameworks have a valid position in the market. While looking at our customers we see that fully featured frameworks such as Flex and Backbase are often used as a full web application, for example as an internet banking application or product information management application. These applications require heavy interaction with backoffice systems and benefit greatly from reusable components and the Model-View-Controller (MVC) principle. In most situations they are positioned next to a CMS in the IT landscape, not on top of a CMS. I have seen some integrations between GX WebManager and Backbase or Flex for example. The integration was done in the presentation layer and in a data layer that delivers the information.

Lightweight javascript frameworks on the other end are often used as an add-on for creating a richer experience or improve the speed by lowering the size and amount of requests from the website. The main benefits of javascript frameworks are their reusability and their independence of propietary clients and backend systems.  In order to create a solid backend they require ways to send and retrieve small bits of data for AJAX requests. That's exactly what we added: additional ways to send small amounts of data in XML or JSON form that can be processed by the javascript framework. Both in the forms module and other components such as the poll and forums.

The rise of jQuery

One of the most common javascript frameworks is jQuery. jQuery has taken a remarkable turn over the last 2 years as you can see in this Google trends view:

According to the developers I talked to jQuery has a very powerful object and event model and one of its other great futures is a simple plugin model. This allows developers to extend basic jQuery behavior with nice add-ons such as rich tables, forms, tree components etc. Needless to say we love jQuery and we are also integrating jQuery more and more in the backend interface of GX WebManager.

So download the latest Community Edition and check the wide variety of examples!

And to wrap it up one question for all the Java Developers here: will you be using JavaFX in our projects in the next few months? If several people say yes we might have to add JavaFX support to the roadmap as well.... Drop your thoughts in the comments.