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20051017 Monday October 17, 2005

What's the best way to integrate Ajax into a Java webapp? I received an e-mail over the weekend asking how to integrating Ajax into into the various web frameworks covered in my Java Web Framework Comparison Whitepaper. Below is my reply: 

The best thing that I've seen is to use DWR, Prototype and Scriptaculous.
These will work with all web frameworks, and if you're using Spring on the backend -
DWR makes it easy to expose your beans as JavaScript objects.

Also, there's a number of tag library solutions that greatly simplify things:

  http://javawebparts.sf.net
  http://ajaxanywhere.sf.net
  http://ajaxtags.sf.net

I haven't used the first one, but I have used AjaxAnywhere and saw a demo of
AjaxTags from its developers.  They both look like they could be very useful.

For those of you using Ajax in your Java webapps - what's your advice? Do you use these same libraries or other ones?

This post was partially motivated by my desire to reiterate things that are so obvious. ;-)

Posted in Java at Oct 17 2005, 10:50:00 AM MDT 12 Comments