AJAX and proxies

David Clover  3 February 2009 23:10:33

Henryk, our Java developer, has been on a number of training courses in the last month to bring him up the speed and standard we need to build the various components of our new Intranet. This week, we took a detailed user brief on an important section of the new site, and today Henryk came up with a brilliantly useful bit of work which means that we can interrogate our back-end data containers - whatever technology they happen to be in - using AJAX/XML/SOAP calls. Henryk has particularly been looking at the EXT JS framework.

His prototype looks at and exposes items on our IT Knowledegbase which contains over 1000 articles - and it's a simple one line form that's easy to use. You just type in a search term (and you can put 'and' in between words if you have a boolean search to do) and up pop titles of articles that might apply. Try searching for the 2007 Microsoft document format ' .docx ' for example to see what we mean.

The neat trick is that the server supplying this to the web reader is not the same server where the data is actually stored - and that's the clever bit that 'goes around the back' wherever it's needed to go, and that's the bit that had stumped us initially.

Our new Intranet uses back-end database containers and is linked by XML to the front-end presentation sections and presented using JSP - which is the modern and professional way to go in these matters - it allows us to re-purpose the data in as many different ways as needed without duplication of the source.

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