Online chat solutions have been very popular long before AJAX was born. There are numerous reasons for this popularity, and you’re probably familiar with them if you’ve ever used an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client, or an Instant Messenger (IM) program, or a Java chat applet. AJAX has pushed online chat solutions forward by making it easy to implement features that are causing trouble or are harder to implement with other technologies. First of all, an AJAX chat application inherits all the typical AJAX benefits, such as integration with existing browser features, and (if written well) cross-platform compatibility.
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Solutions | J2EE to .NET 2.0 Migration
Since almost two years, there has been an active debate over the endurance of the two giant enterprise platforms, Microsoft‘s .NET and Sun‘s Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE). Which technology would emerge as the leading platform for developing new web applications?
Now that the combat has settled down a bit, each platform has managed to capture a substantial share of market for itself. In fact, many organizations have arranged for a strategy for one or the other of these frameworks. But many (e.g. those which have large investments in the legacy systems) are still evaluating the merits of the two platforms. The IT personnel in those businesses is questioning as to what extent would choosing .NET or J2EE influence their host strategy, etc.
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How is it different from building an application using visual studio for dot net or any visual java development tool?
The basic difference is the amount of programming that needs to be done is significantly reduced. Reasonably complex applications ERP, CRM, HMS, HCMS, etc can be built without writing programs in any programming language. However, fundamental database and SQL (select statements)
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Silverlight is Microsoft’s cross-browser, cross-platform browser plug-in that allows the creation of interactive web applications that employ high quality streaming media, vector graphics, images, and animation. Deployed as a plug-in for the major browsers on the Windows, Mac and Linux (supported by Novell) operating systems, web developers can craft interactive applications that have an identical user experience on the vast majority of web browsers deployed today. Silverlight addresses a disconnect that exists today in web development workflow where the design intent of graphics designers and interaction designers cannot be faithfully communicated to and crafted by the web developers. In Silverlight, this intent is created in design tools like Expression Design and Expression Blend and passed off to web developers in XML-based XAML data files. The fidelity of the designers’ ideas is kept as there is a clear separation between the design in XAML and the code in JavaScript.
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A number of new geospatial viewing tools from major players in the Internet industry have recently appeared on the scene and are taking the geospatial world by storm. Google,Yahoo, Microsoft, and Amazon have all released web-based mapping tools in the recent past, and collectively these new players to the industry have raised the bar for Internet mapping. Although their functional capabilities don’t provide anything we haven’t seen in web offerings from traditional GIS vendors, their emergence has been significant in that they have managed to capture a wider audience. Google, in particular, has emerged as the leader of this pack with it’s recently released Google Maps product which provides a slick, highly responsive visual interface built using AJAX technologies along with detailed street and aerial imagery data, and an open API allowing customization of the map output including the ability to add application specific data to the map.
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It’s almost impossible today to be involved in web application design or development and not be aware of Ajax, a technology that includes but is not limited to Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. That’s because Ajax is currently the primary technique for driving the high responsiveness and interactivity of some of the most popular applications on the web such as Google Maps and Flickr. These applications are representative of a new generation of highly responsive, highly interactive web applications, referred to as Web 2.0 applications, that often involve users collaborating online and sharing content.
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Web applications have entered a new era driven by web site goals such as fast response to user actions and user collaboration in creating and sharing web site content. The popular term attributed to these highly responsive and often collaborative sites is Web 2.0. Some prime examples of Web 2.0 are web sites such as Google Maps and Flickr. Google Maps offers a highly responsive user interface (UI). For instance, you can view a map, then move your cursor across it to see adjacent areas almost immediately. Flickr is a site on which users store and share photographs — users manage almost all the site’s content.
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In a few short months, Ajax has moved from an obscure and rarely used technology to the hottest thing since sliced bread.
This article introduces the incredibly easy-to-use Ajax support that is part of the Ruby on Rails web application framework. This is not a step-by-step tutorial, and I assume that you know a little bit about how to organize and construct a Rails web application. If you need a quick refresher, check out Rolling with Ruby on Rails, Part 1 and Part 2.
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