YAF4AJN: Yet Another Frontendcontroller For Ajax / Json Networks

Intro

YAF4AJN - spoken [ j a: f ai n ] - is a javascript library completely separating the frontend and the backend of a rich internet application (RIA): Computed values are asynchronously ordered by and delivered to the browser. The library YAF4AJN integrates the values into the page. And the user can interact with the page while the backend still is computing the still missed values. The specific idea of YAF4AJN is, that you nevertheless need not to code javascript for creating such an AJAX based RIA, neither into your html-pages, nor into any external javascript-files.

This library has been developed by a team of Deutsche Telekom AG (namely by Karsten Reincke, Heiko Dassow, Marco Juliano). And finally Deutsche Telekom AG has decided to publish YAF4AJN as opensource software. It is licensed under the LGPL. Sourceforge ist hosting the project YAF4AJN and offers a YAF4AJN download page.

On thursday 06 march 2008 Karsten Reincke and his colleagues give a lecture at the iX Conference / CeBIT 2008 concerning YAF4AJN.

Details

As you already know, YAF4AJN is a little javascript library (operating on the large ajax framework prototype - a really broad shouldered father). YAF4AJN hides the ajax code from the developer while connecting the frontend  and the backend of a rich internet application: Whenever the backend has computed a partial solution it sends the reached intermediate steps to the YAF4AJN-Page which makes the prevalid solution already visible, while the backend machine is computing the missing parts. That's the idea of AJAX. The idea of YAF4AJN is that you need not to write any javascript code. You must only give that element of your html-page a specific YAF4AJN-ID, which finally shall present the asynchronously computed value. And then all the rest is done by the YAF4AJN-library itself (and naturally by the backend machine). [Naturally the developer can integrate his own JS-Code even if it is overloading existing YAF4AJN methods. But it is not nescessary, that he does so. That's the root of the matter!]

Following the old rule Demo or Die we offer you a little YAFAJN-Demo, which shows both ways: the pure usage of YAF4AJN and the overloading change.