Book Image

Backbase 4 RIA Development

Book Image

Backbase 4 RIA Development

Overview of this book

Backbase is a very powerful and complex JavaScript library, with many user interface components to help make web development easier. It allows the development of Rich Internet Applications (RIA) that run within all major browsers but its powers and complexity mean that the choice of component can be overwhelming. Understanding when and how to use the right component might not always be straightforward. This book makes that easier. This is a practical book that teaches you how to use the Backbase Client Framework effectively, with a complete overview and many examples. A core developer of the framework puts the technologies used into a wider perspective of existing web standards and a seasoned software architect explains why XML-based UI definition produces better web applications. The transparent use of AJAX technologies, for example to submit forms, or to retrieve updates for data grids, can be taken for granted with the Backbase framework. Packed with examples, the book shows you how to get the most from the library of UI components, and then extend the library with its own custom language. With this book in hand, it is easy to enable AJAX within your web application. You will be able to use the Backbase framework effectively, from basic applications to complex, custom-defined UI components. This book contains a complete overview of all the UI libraries available within the Backbase framework and shows examples for each element described. The Backbase framework offers an innovative Tag Definition Language (TDL), which allows developers to create new UI components that can be used as XML elements, in the same way as using the built-in GUI library. Using TDL brings considerable development advantages, and this book explains how. Significant attention is also given to architectural aspects of designing a web-application, showing sample applications using a model-view-controller approach.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Backbase 4 RIA Development
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface

Download the Backbase framework


Your development environment is now set up; therefore, it is time to download Backbase Client Framework from http://www.backbase.com/download.

Once you have downloaded the package, which comes as a ZIP file, you can unzip it to a convenient location. The unzipped package should look similar to this:

Note

Warning: What we describe here is the structure of the Backbase package as you can find it on the Web at the time of writing. Changes have occurred in the past and may happen again.

In order to use the Backbase framework, your web server must send it to a browser. Therefore, we must copy the framework to a location where the web server can find it. Your web server serves its pages from its document root. Its default location for the document root can be very different depending on the web server you are using and by configuring the web server, you can have multiple roots at almost any location in the file system on the host of your web server.

Let's assume that your development web server is Apache from the XAMPP package and that you have installed it on the C: drive. The default document root is then: c:\xampp\htdocs. The easy way to install the Backbase framework is to copy the backbase folder found in the web folder and paste it as a subfolder of htdocs. For the time being, you can delete the 4_4_1_optimized folder that you just copied. You will need the optimized version of the framework only when you are actually deploying your application on a publicly visible server.