Web 2.0: Not just for communities

Exposing internal services often changes the way they interact with customers and partners and enabling new business models. Developing Web applications that leverage these services and data sources is challenging.

Web 1.0 was designed for sharing and browsing hyper-linked documents. The technology stack serves this purpose well. However, Web 1.0 was never meant for real applications and is limited by the click, wait and page refresh interaction model. Web 2.0 technologies address the shortcomings of the Web 1.0 model, but Web 2.0 introduces some of the following development challenges:

• Need for new technical skills around client-side programming
• Testing and debugging challenges
• Technology immaturity and confusion over the abundance of technology options
• Lack of samples and best practices
• Better tooling is needed

IBM® WebSphere® sMash provides the following features:

• Application building in the Web 2.0 development style
• Dynamic scripting power and simplicity
• Community-based visual tools to develop business logic
• Visual design editors for constructing rich user interfaces

Client side solution - Ajax

With Ajax, the following client side solutions are provided:

Enterprise-ready Ajax toolkit

Creating a Web-based user experience for the enterprise requires Ajax technologies that are built with enterprise requirements in mind. WebSphere sMash uses and extends the capabilities of the open source Dojo Toolkit--an enterprise quality Ajax toolkit to which IBM and other companies have contributed features such as accessibility, internationalization, data access, and high-quality widgets. This Ajax toolkit is available within many IBM products, such as the WebSphere Feature Pack for Web 2.0, so you can connect WebSphere sMash Ajax front-ends to content residing on WebSphere Application Server-based products.

WebSphere sMash also uses technology from the Open Ajax Alliance that allows widgets built with WebSphere sMash to coexist with other third party Ajax widget libraries which also use the Open Ajax technology. Though these are the libraries shipped with WebSphere sMash, nothing within the WebSphere sMash architecture requires that you use them. You can use other third-party Ajax technologies of your choice and connect them to your WebSphere sMash back end feeds and services.

Ajax/REST connectivity

Although Ajax provides a better user experience through high quality widgets, widgets are only as good as the content that is displayed and manipulated in them. With the wide variety of data available on the internet and inside the enterprise today, the task of connecting widgets to data can be costly to develop. WebSphere sMash provides Javascript™ libraries that allow Ajax applications to connect easily to a variety of formats on the back end.

WebSphere sMash simplifies data access, when used with WebSphere sMash's REST data services, by pairing client-side Javascript data access libraries with back end REST data services. Connecting Ajax applications to very large enterprise data sets, while maintaining performance and user experience, is a difficult task that WebSphere sMash simplifies with the built-in Ajax and REST connectivity features.

Secure Ajax library for mashups

There are serious security risks that arise when you create Ajax applications that have content and widgets from different sources that are potentially untrusted. IBM is leading the way on providing solutions to these problems. In WebSphere sMash, you will find the latest IBM Javascript libraries for securing content within your HTML pages. This is the same code base we've contributed to the OpenAjax Alliance which will become part of the OpenAjax Hub 1.1 reference implementation currently under development. With WebSphere sMash, you can take advantage of this important IBM technology today, and know that it will become part of emerging open standards in the future.

Application as the server

With the application as the server, you create an application and run it. There is no packaging or deploying an application to a server; rather the application is the server. When you run a WebSphere sMash application a runtime environment, including an HTTP stack, is included. Applications are maintained with dependency management. Deployment of an application involves installing the application from the repository. All scripts and classes are contained within your application and run within the Java™ process that is started. Any dependency declared in an application is included on the classpath statement. Therefore, you can zip up an application from one machine, copy it to another machine, unzip it and, after the applications dependencies are resolved, you can start it without any traditional deployment needed.