Ajax Girl

Mathew Brooks of RDF Group has published a summary of his experiences in developing mform — an Ajax-enabled mortgage application — using the Echo2 platform. Although fairly high level, the post is thought provoking and doesn’t just focus just on Ajax. With regard to best practices in using Echo2, he writes:

Whilst using echo 2 we discovered that whilst it was the most advanced tool for the job (at least when we started, which was before GWTcame out) we did find that we had to undertake the following:

• Adjust some of the java script in widget peers where it was not quite performing as we expected
• Subclass the echo 2 servlet to ensure that:
  • We can trap non java script type clients and present a “non javascript” type version of the page
  • We can present a more polished start up page rather than the ||| presented as default by echo 2
• Some post back functionality does not work well with IE either under load or restricted bandwidth. Due to the way that IE polls for the post back other events on the browser were being missed.
• Develop our own widgets where necessary if there was no suitable one available from echo or echopointNG

Beyond Echo2, the application makes use of ServiceMix (the Open Source ESB), Spring, Hibernate and EJB3. It also integrates with a CMS — Hippo — for conetent management. I haven’t used ServiceMix myself, but I have used the Mule ESB myself (it has much better docs and tutorials, IMHO), and beyond the SOA help it provides, I’ve found it’s support for FutureTask very helpful for some of the asynchronous processing you see more of in Ajax apps.

Mathew’s analysis goes well beyond just Ajax, of course, with some thoughts on how to avoid the Anaemic Data Model antipattern, among other things.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/application-development-with-echo2-plus-soa