Friday, November 2nd, 2007
New Ajax for Old Iron
Category: Ext
, Flash, JSON, Showcase
In the rush to develop entirely new Web 2.0 systems based on Ajax, it is often easy to lose sight of how it can be used to improve the so-called “legacy” enterprise systems. Over at the Ext JS blog, there’s a post about German developer who put together a reporting/BI application to front-end RPG code running on an AS400.
The backend serves up JSON data (together with this old article about reskinning a Spring MVC application with Tibco GI, it makes for a solid approach for refactoring existing webapps) to the Ext JS/Flash front-end. Slick. You can view a demo (unfortunately in German for you non-German speakers) here.
4.2 rating from 64 votes
That is pretty slick. I’ve never tried ExtJS but I do think I’ll give it a shot now. If it can do all that on top of JSON….
Great reason to try out ExtJS!
ExtJS is great, unless you are sick of the inactive hidden dom elements in the dom tree which are waiting for another call to pop-up. We’re developing totally a great new tool for web applications using that library and after 2 months of experience, I’ll have to admit that this lib is simply beautiful although it’s not even “that” popular.
It’s not longer German only now. Just FYI.
This is what I would call a RIA - in opposite to other frameworks. Very nice and properly done!
Does anyone know how the charts in the example are made?? Cause I can’t seem to find them in the Ext js library.
Nice to see that someone is doing nifty things on top of AS400. Most programmers would just tell you that it requires to be rebuilt.
@bs133140: Obviously charts done in Flash. Or more likely in Flex. The way how they appear is very Flex-looking.