Killer JavaScript Technology Frameworks for Java Platform Developers: An Exploration of Prototype, Script.aculo.us, and Rico
TS-6590

Web developers have long been mired in the mundane world of form processing. Servlets and the first wave of web application frameworks such as Struts extended the original World Wide Web, which began as a set of hyperlinked documents built on the stateless HTTP protocol. Servlets and those web application frameworks added state and gave us the ability to implement rudimentary applications that presented a set of fields to their users along with a button to submit that information and move on to another banal web page with yet another form.

All the while, desktop application developers enjoyed rich user interface (UI) frameworks where interactivity ruled. Desktop applications sported components and drag and drop and let their users manipulate controls without redrawing the entire page in response to those manipulations.

Then Asynchronous JavaScript And XML (Ajax) burst on the scene. Google, with Gmail and Google Maps, led the Ajaxian surge with web applications that were nearly as interactive as desktop applications. Suddenly, the JavaScript programming language, which for a long time was frowned upon as a poor cousin of the Java programming language, was on every web application developer's radar, as bosses and clients demanded applications that were as responsive as Gmail.

But much to the chagrin of developers using the Java programming language, the JavaScript programming language, other than having a syntactic resemblance to the Java programming language, is not the Java programming language at all. The JavaScript language is a powerful language in its own right, but it is a far cry from the statically typed, inheritance-based Java programming language. To a developer using the Java programming language, the JavaScript language is foreign and can be vexing to use. If you are a developer who uses the Java programming language but has no JavaScript language experience, for example, odds are that you are not going to dive into the JavaScript language and come up with a drag-and-drop framework in a few days of feverish coding.

Fortunately for everyone involved, the next evolution of Ajax was JavaScript language frameworks--such as Prototype, Script.aculo.us, and Rico--that make JavaScript easier to use and provide indispensable features such as special effects, drag-and-drop, and behaviors. Suddenly, the JavaScript language and Ajax have become much more accessible not only to developers using the Java programming language but also to software developers in general.

This session explores the aforementioned frameworks: Prototype, which adds low-level JavaScript language enhancements in addition to Ajax underpinnings; Script.aculo.us, which builds on Prototype to provide UI-specific whizbang features such as special effects and drag-and-drop; and Rico, also built on top of Prototype, which adds behaviors--attaching Ajaxian behaviors to ordinary HTML--to the mix.

Prototype and its derivatives have enjoyed a great deal of popularity, mostly in the Ruby arena, but they are just as valuable to developers using the Java programming language. This session looks at these frameworks from the perspective of developers using the Java programming language. You learn how to integrate Prototype and Script.aculo.us into applications based on servlets and JavaServer Pages (JSP) technology and how to wrap Rico components with JavaServer Faces components. Come see how you can take advantage of the Prototype family of JavaScript language frameworks in your Java technology-based web applications.

If you attend this session, you should have some familiarity with the JavaScript language, in addition to a solid understanding of the Java programming language and servlets. Some familiarity with JavaServer Faces technology is also desirable. When you leave this session, you will have a good understanding of Prototype and its derivative frameworks and how you can use them in your Java technology-based web applications.

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