OpenLink AJAX Toolkit
OpenLink AJAX Toolkit (OAT) is a JavaScript-based toolkit for browser-independent Rich Internet Application development. It includes a rich collection of UI Widgets/Controls, Event Management System, and a truly platform independent Data Access Layer called AJAX Database Connectivity. OpenLink AJAX Toolkit is fully OpenAjax Alliance Conformant.
Functionality
There is a broad range of functionality in OAT including information visualization, GUI Widgets and Database Connectivity
Information Visualization
There are many different ways of visualizing data using OAT, these include:
- Charts such as Line chart, Pie chart and Bar graph.
- Grid view.
- Pivot table.
File System Interaction
- WebDAV Browser enables you to navigate a WebDAV instance as if it were a local filesystem.
- An Upload Interface supporting batch uploads.
Graphical User Interface Widgets
There are many Widgets in OAT to ease development of application User Interfaces, including:
- Combo Boxes, Combo Lists, Combo Buttons.
- "Quickedit" -- simple editing without text-box input.
- Sliders, Date Pickers and Color Pickers.
- "Enhanced Anchors" enabling you to show a new widget on screen.
- "Ghost drag" enabling the user to drag one item onto another and update objects accordingly. For example, this is quite useful for dragging items into a shopping cart.
Semantic Web and Aggregated Data Visualization
OAT is also able to cleanly visualize:
- RDF Data as a graph.
- RSS Feeds.
AJAX DataBase Connectivity
Provides a database independent data access layer for OAT and other JavaScript based libraries/frameworks/toolkits. The JavaScript equivalent of ODBC, JDBC, OLE DB, and ADO.NET, it uses XMLA to facilitate direct and platform independent access to remote database engines via XMLA providers.
As a core component of OAT, the Ajax Database Connectivity layer enables:
- Development and usage of data bound controls such as the Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, Microsoft Virtual Earth, and OpenLayers mapping services controls, Pivot Tables, Comb Boxes, TimeLines, and many more.
- Development of data aware applications with the ability to calibrate change sensitivity via support for scrollable cursors (detached row-sets that are change sensitive)
- Build a complex SQL, XML, SPARQL, Web Services based applications without exposure to data access complexity
Miscellaneous
Other controls include:
- "Tree control" -- a content tree system where nodes can be expanded and collapsed.
- "Dock" -- a drag and drop widget feature similar to the movable iGoogle Gadgets.
- "Ticker" -- a ticker system reminiscent of STOCK Ticker Machines.
- "FishEye" -- an Eye candy ICONS System which is similar to the Mac OS X Dock System.
- "Timeline" -- a system which allows you to plot data onto a Timeline interface.
- "OS-Styled Windows" -- automatically recognizing which Operating system the user is using, OAT adjusts the Graphical User Interface widgets it generates to match the local environment.
- Cryptography.
Technical Information
Built-in functions are able to natively use/manipulate the following technologies:
- JSON
- Resource Description Framework (RDF) (including parsers for RDF/XML and Turtle)
- RSS
- Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)
- SOAP
- SPARQL
- SQL
- XML
Use
OAT is used extensively in the OpenLink Data Spaces and a variety of front-ends to the Virtuoso Universal Server that include:
- RDF Browser 2
- RDF Browser
- Interactive SPARQL Query Builder (iSPARQL)
- Web Forms Designer
- Database Designer
- Interactive "Query By Example" SQL Query Builder
External links
- Official OAT website includes more information, demos and downloads.
- OpenAjax Alliance website includes more information AbOUT OpenAjax Conformance.