An Alphablox application typically has grids and charts that can be served in a DHTML rendering, accessible using supported web browsers.
The grids and charts rendered in the DHTML client have an easy-to-use user interface that shields the users from the complexity of analyzing data. When you add a PresentBlox, it can nest a GridBlox, a ChartBlox, a ToolbarBlox, a PageBlox, and a DataLayoutBlox to offer users interactive data analysis, bookmarking, data exporting, and view customization capability. As a developer you can customize and personalize various components in the interface to meet your design needs.
The DataLayoutBlox appears as a data layout panel, enabling users to interactively move and view dimensions among axes. The ToolbarBlox appears as a toolbar, providing quick access to commonly performed data analysis tasks with a click of the mouse. The menu bar offers all the options and actions available to the users. Users can bookmark a view, hide and show the grid or chart, sort data, export the data to PDF or Excel, and navigate the data. The PageBlox appears as a page filter, allowing users to filter data to appear in the GridBlox and ChartBlox. All these Blox are nested inside a PresentBlox to simplify application development and conserve screen real estate.
The components in the user interface can be customized using JSP tags provided in the Alphablox Tag Libraries. For example, you can specify the colors to use, add or remove buttons in the toolbar, add or remove menus from the menu bar, or add or remove data navigation options. You can also specify a set of criteria for highlighting cells, a feature called Cell Alerts (such as displaying cells in red if they have a value lower than the minimum specified).
A key strength of this user interface is that it does not involve page refreshes every time a user interacts with the data. The user does not have to wait for the entire page to be downloaded, which means longer wait and the likelihood to lose track of the original context. In a portal environment, this is a huge benefit since refreshing the whole portal page involves reloading all the portlets on the page and can take up significantly more time.