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Flip for Flapjax

Meet a better-than-JavaScript programming language for modern Web applications

Cameron Laird (claird@phaseit.net), Vice President, Phaseit, Inc.

Cameron Laird is a long-time developerWorks contributor and former columnist. He often writes about the open source projects that accelerate development of his employer's applications, focusing on reliability and security. He has written about JavaScript since 1997.

Summary: Meet Flapjax -- a new programming language with an old syntax based on standard JavaScript. With Flapjax you can easily program data sharing, interfaces to external Web services, persistence, and end-user responsiveness in Web applications.

Date: 20 Feb 2007
Level: Intermediate
PDF: A4 and Letter (107 KB | 14 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®

Activity: 10201 views
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Before you start

About this tutorial

Flapjax, an improved way to build Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) applications, offers more than just a library of conveniences. This tutorial emphasizes simple, self-contained steps to successfully apply Flapjax to real-world problems. (The Flapjax Web site also has a helpful tutorial -- see Resources.)

Objectives

When you finish this tutorial, you'll have working examples of Web applications that work with any JavaScript-enabled browser to:

Manage user actions and data arrivals in terms of "behavior" and "event stream" abstractions
Retrieve public Web services coded as JavaScript conveniently

You'll also become comfortable writing and running simple Flapjax programs in several modes, including a compiled form suitable for deployment.

Prerequisites

While familiarity with JavaScript and HTML are crucial for independent use of Flapjax, any GUI application developer will be able to use most of this tutorial. The tutorial guides beginning-level programmers through working examples while introducing intermediate-level concepts to help contrast Flapjax with other programming systems.

System requirements

To execute the examples here, you need a modern JavaScript-capable browser; any recent release of Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer, or Safari will do. Beyond the browser, you might want access to a Web server, although it isn't necessary. The most minimal hosts -- a 100 MHz Pentium, for example, and a Web server with no dynamic page capabilities -- are adequate for the demonstrations that follow.

Comments

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