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Thursday, December 08, 2005

BackBase - AJAX - Rich Internet Applications

www.backbase.com Backbase provides Rich Internet Application (RIA) software that radically improves the usability and effectiveness of online applications, and increases developer productivity. With Backbase you can build web applications with a richer and more responsive user interface.

Although DHTML technology has been around for some years, Google’s new web applications (Google Suggest and Google Maps) have boosted the awareness of a model based on DHTML, AJAX and W3C standards for creating Rich Internet Applications. The Backbase Presentation Client (BPC) is an AJAX engine based entirely on AJAX technology, and differentiates itself via a generic User Interface declaration language (BXML). BXML is a XML application that also includes many XSLT and XPath functions. BXML is interpreted by the AJAX engine, and translated to native DOM commands in the browser. The Backbase AJAX Engine is developed in JavaScript, and it works in Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Firefox and soon also in Opera and Safari. It does not require any type of plug-in, which differentiates Backbase from other RIA vendors.

Backbase software can be used to build more interactive websites and better user interfaces, web interfaces, web GUIs or web-based replacements for desktop rich clients. From a usability perspective Backbase has a noticable impact: people involved in Interaction Design and User Interface Design suddenly have much more possibilities than with regular websites. The software contains GUI builder functionality that speeds up GUI development significantly and developers are not confronted with the details of JavaScript, XML and XMLHttpRequest, but can just add extra tags to their HTML pages.

Backbase rich clients can be easily combined with Java & J2EE, .NET & ASP.NET, XML, XSLT and XPath. The .NET Server Edition offers drag-and-drop RIA development with Visual Studio.NET. Plug-ins for Eclipse and DreamWeaver are also available. The XML Server Edition can be installed on both Java platforms and on Microsoft Windows (Native .NET Application).