Foreword
The technology that is the foundation of the Ajax platform is taking the Web by storm. By using the capabilities of contemporary browsers to their fullest, Ajax enables a new level of rich user experiences for the Web with technologies that are fully standardized and broadly available.
Ajax’s underlying capabilities have been available for some time in browsers such as Internet Explorer, but only in recent years has the Web evolved to bring these capabilities into the mainstream, making richer web experiences commonplace. For developers, however, providing these experiences also increases the complexity of web development.
When we set out to develop Atlas in 2005, we wanted to dramatically simplify Ajax-style web application development and make it easy for any developer to build a rich, interactive, personalized web experience for the browser. Atlas addresses many of the key challenges of Ajax development, including:
- A high-productivity development experience for JavaScript and Ajax
Due to the lack of end-to-end frameworks and tools, learning and working with JavaScript is a frequent challenge for Ajax development. Atlas makes it possible for anyone to build web applications by wiring together components, without having to learn JavaScript or DHTML. And for experienced script and Ajax developers, Atlas provides a useful set of patterns and tools to build reusable Ajax components. Because the client framework is written in JavaScript, it is incredibly easy to deploy.
Along ...