Wednesday, 25 July 2007
The language for Ajax with ICEfaces is JSF
One of the central themes of ICEfaces is the language that the developer and designer use to define their Ajax application. The important point is that it has nothing to do with Ajax at all. Ajax should be transparent, with development and design taking place at the right level of abstraction for the application. JavaServer Faces already provides a standard language: the model is developed as ordinary JavaBeans and the view is designed as XHTML pages dynamically bound to the model via expressions.
The combination of these two languages (particularly if Facelets rather than JSP is used) is sufficient for defining the model and the view of the application. With the behavior and the appearance of the application specified, it is then the responsibility of the framework to project the application onto the particular user interface technology available in the best possible way (in today's infrastructure, this is an Ajax application). If a change to one component should result in a change to another component because of how the two components are related through the model, it is not the page designer's responsibility to identify this relationship; it should be emergent directly from how the two components are bound to the model.
In other words, the ICEfaces developer is an application developer, not an Ajax developer.
Posted by at 12:21 PM in Entries by Ted Goddard