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

Why is data binding important?


To answer this question, we take a look at a simple example and we will contrast a non data-bound and a data-bound solution to display a set of data.

The inspiration for this example is associated with our experience in developing the C3D travel blog sample application. While being away in China, we were entering our travel experiences in the travel blog. We split up our long trip into parts, to get a better overview and to have more than one trip to show you, with realistic content. Therefore, we now have a list of trips, although still from only one user.

Assume that we would like to show an overview of the trips on our C3D website. We could display a simple HTML table, and it would look like this:

Even if you use fancy MVC techniques to develop your server-side application and templates to produce the view output, the final HTML source that is sent to the client browser has the data content mixed with the HTML table structure tags, as in the following code...