The missing architecture of the AEA (AJAX Enterprise Applications)

Building a backend agnostic, highly responsive, flexible and customizable enterprise application that has to retrieve and display in some of the screens data from more then 40 different commands, in fully asynchronous manner, caching all results and loading all relevant resources on demand, needs something more then just a ‘Hello world’ AJAX library. Most of the existing AJAX frameworks are not suitable for large scale projects where:

1. The application has to be customizable without a need of changing any JavaScript code – just by changing configuration files.
2. The application has to be operational while a large number of data requests are received.
3. Number of asynchronous tasks has to be marshaled to prevent a message storm caused by the single treaded nature of JavaScript.
4. The application has to deal with multiple locales in utf-8 encoded data.

The browser based framework we created is based on XML and XSLT with an execution pipe line where:

• an asynchronous job queue mechanism takes care of all dependencies;

• synchronizations between the jobs;

• on demand data and resource loading;

• job cancellations when the user switches to another screen

and many, many more. The presentation will cover the challenges we faced and the how we created an architecture that deals with them very successfully. The proposed architecture is particularly useful in data intensive while label AJAX Enterprise Applications.