[ANNOUNCE] Podcast with Ted Goddard of ICEsoft

Hello,

Believe it or not, JSFCentral has more content :-). We just posted an interview with ICEsoft senior architect Ted Goddard. It was recorded in May of 2007 at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco, CA. Here’s an excerpt:

Kito:

Okay, so you talk about Ajax Framework and Ajax Push, let' s talk about the Ajax Framework part. Is ICEfaces a component suite or framework or both?

Ted:

It' s both really. ICEfaces starts off with an architecture for updating the page. Once you have the ability to generally update the page, you start using a technique we call Direct-to-DOM rendering. Then you can build a bunch of interesting components around that. We also make use of some JavaScript libraries like Prototype and Script.aculo.us so that we can expose the capabilities of Script.aculo.us to the developer. Script.aculo.us is a really nice JavaScript API but what if you are not a JavaScript developer? Then you need a nice Java API for working with Script.aculo.us, so what we do is provide Script.aculo.us effects modeled in JSF so that the JSF developer can have drag and drop and effects capabilities.

Kito:

You mentioned Direct-to-DOM techniques, what is that?

Ted:

Direct-to-DOM is the technique that ICEfaces uses to render the JSF components. The way it works is, instead of rendering to a stream as JSF normally would, ICEfaces components render into a document object model on the server. That allows us to efficiently detect just the changes to that DOM and send just the changes down to the browser. The ability to send just the changes to a browser page is one of the key user interface features of Ajax. When you interact with an Ajax application, you don' t want a full page refresh, you just want the page to be updated in place. This change detection through the Document Object Model on the server is a very effective way to do that.

Read the full article or download the podcast here: http://www.jsfcentral.com/articles/goddard-06-08.html.

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Kito D. Mann - Author, JavaServer Faces in Action
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