Overview of Process Platform AJAX Toolkit

This topic provides an overview of Process Platform Ajax Toolkit.

Process Platform Ajax Toolkit is a collection of easy-to-use tools and components that facilitate Web Application Development. AJAX Toolkit provides a single-source application generation solution that delivers HTML content.

Process Platform Web Gateway receives request, rendered as an HTML file, from the client and sends it to the Web server. The server accesses the data available in the database and sends it back to the front-end in HTML format. The processing of the data and sending it back to the front-end is done at the server side, thus increasing the server load.
The disadvantages of the typical server side processing are:

• The load on the server increases.
• The client is used as a dumb machine - the full potential of the client machine is not utilized.
  
  Process Platform Ajax Toolkit can be used to create a client-side data processing environment. The AJAX Toolkit passes the client request to the gateway in the Web server. The server obtains the relevant data from the database and passes the result back to the client in an XML format. The client renders the XML to HTML.
  The advantages of this processing are:
• The load on the server decreases, resulting in better scalability.
• Data manipulation is done on the client side.
  
  AJAX Toolkit contains a set of rich web components built using JavaScript. These Web components are simple, lightweight components that encapsulate specific functionality (behavior) on a page. When applied to a standard HTML element on a page, a web component enhances that element's default behavior. Web components enable
• extending the functionality of existing tags
• extending HTML by creating custom tags
• encapsulation of code
• componentization of code
  
  Within Process Platform Ajax Toolkit architecture, the AJAX toolkit components (library) communicate with the web server using Web Gateway.
  
  The following diagram depicts this scenario:
  
  Communication between the browser and the gateway is performed by a behavior called the BusDataIsland . BusDataIsland exposes a set of properties, methods, and events to enable the developer to obtain data from the transaction object and manipulate the transaction object. It can also change the organizational context or receiver Service Group at run time.
  
  Note: Process Platform XForms uses the Process Platform Ajax Toolkit framework to enable you to generate Web applications. For a description of how the Process Platform Ajax Toolkit framework works while loading CUSP, see Flow of Control while Loading CUSP.