The OpenLink Ajax Toolkit

Yesterday Ajaxian posted a story about a new toolkit coming out of the open ajax alliance, and the first thing I thought was "Wow, are those guys actually _doing_ anything?" :) Since their website have had a very ... meeting kind of look to it for ages (at least when last I looked).

And then they drop something like OAT. It by far the most nice-looking, sexy and comprehensive ajax toolkit I've ever seen (Except for Dojo, in fair parts, but Dojo is also a bit bloated at the moment).

And they have a visual designer, which lets you drag, drop, resize and position html elements, widgets, tables, wahoos and whatnots.

They've got data binding to tables and whatnots (At the moment they seem completely tied to XMLA, which stands foe XML for discovery, has nothing to do with XML whatsoever, could have been done better in YAML and lets you query and manage a database about metadata, database, schema, tables and that sort of thing. Neat, but MS-centric, therefore uninterresting).

But if we survive that (which of course we somehow must) the've also got an Ajaxified visual database designer! It's shockfull of goodies and fairly well thought out, even if the architectural specifics is missing from the bundled docs.

What is really interesting is that they have/are working on (I'm waiting for incoming documents) standards for component messaging - just like JDA :) Also they're working on component publish/subscribe functionality so you can request components from a central repository, both from a web-page but also from an IDE, and then publish your finished widgets as well.

I'm interrested in finding out if there's common ground between JDA and the Open Ajax messaging specification, becasue .. they're the standard. It says so right there on the box :). Stay tuned for further developments.

Anyway, despite my mild griping here, it's relaly an incredible late christmas present. Thanks!

Comments

Forgive my late discovery of this article...

First thing, thank you for the overall kind words. It's nice to have someone "get it" about a very new tool like this.

I am rather curious why you think that XMLA, XML for Analysis, is MS-centric, ... uninteresting, and less-than-YAML?

Your comments here don't tell me what you think YAML would have delivered better than XMLA in the data-binding areas, and that's frustrating -- as it means I cannot address your perceptions directly, whether by correcting a misunderstanding or by changing something we've done with OAT...