Beginning Spring Framework 2

Chapter 7. Ajax and Spring: Direct Web Remoting Integration

The Internet felt a little dated and boring until a set of recent events. The unveiling of two experimental projects by Google — Google Maps and Google Earth — changed all that and the enthusiasm of the web application development communities was reignited. These applications present a new type of user interaction. Instead of user interactions being interleaved with page submissions and a wait for the server to reply, the application responds immediately. The so-called World Wide Wait (a cynical reinterpretation of the acronym WWW) is now over and Web 2.0 (coined for the radically different feel of these highly interactive applications) is here.

The underlying mechanism that enables these highly interactive web applications has actually been in the leading browser for several years; it just has not been exploited in the fashion demonstrated in the new Google applications. Without a fantastic name to describe the groundbreaking technology, practitioners have taken to describing the interaction exactly — Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Thus was born Ajax.

This chapter provides a detailed description of the mechanism behind Ajax and shows how it works. You also get hands-on experience with wiring library components to implement a highly interactive album search page for the PIX system. The library component used is an open-source library called Direct Web Remoting 2.0, or DWR 2.

By the end of the chapter, you will:

• Appreciate ...