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GCN Home > 10/10/05 issue

GCN INSIDER: Trends and technologies that affect the way government does IT

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

Mr. Clean comes to the Web

The latest buzz in the Web development world is AJAX, an acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (XML itself is short for Extensible Markup Language). To hear the evangelists tell it, AJAX finally gives Web developers the power to build pages that can have as many features as regular desktop applications.

“Web interaction designers can’t help but feel a little envious of our colleagues who create desktop software. Desktop applications have a richness and responsiveness that has seemed out of reach on the Web,” explained Jesse James Garrett in an essay explaining the concept [Go to GCN.com and enter 488 in the Quickfind box]. Garrett is the founder of usability consultants Adaptive Path LLC of San Francisco.

AJAX puts Web developers on equal footing with their program developers, Garrett claims. AJAX is not a new technology itself, but rather a collection of such technologies as JavaScript, the Document Object Model, Cascading Style Sheets and other geeky Web widgets. AJAX will work in recent versions of major browsers.

Traditionally, when a live Web page needs to be changed or updated, the browser sends a request to a server, which sends back a new page. This approach limits the features a page can offer and gives them a clunky feel. In contrast, AJAX drops a JavaScript-based processing engine on the browser, usually in a hidden frame. The engine acts as liaison between the browser and the server, smoothing over the performance during transitional times and adding more functionality.

Google Maps (http://maps.google. com) is an AJAX service. This Web site lets users tug a map around on the screen to find a particular location, augment the map with satellite views and overlay the map with textual information. Pretty nifty. So when will government sites make use of this technology?

Sifting through intelligence

Intelligence software provider i2 Inc. of Springfield, Va., has introduced a search engine specifically designed to query the charts produced by its flagship i2 Visual Notebook software. This application should help users of Visual Notebook make better use of their old output.

Intelligence and law enforcement agencies have long used Visual Notebook to make charts or visual representations of complex scenarios. The software provides little icons that represent the characters, as well as connective lines that run among them and represent relationships.

More news on related topics: Web Strategies



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