Interesting features in Web 2.0 feature pack of Websphere v6.1

IBM has recently released a new feature pack for WAS 6.1 that has a host of cool features to build Web 2.0 applications.
AJAX support is provided by the DOJO Toolkit. There are a host of gadgets available (some added by IBM on top of DOJO) for RIA screens. Some features that were of particular interest to me are:

• A javascript SOAP client that will enable web clients to make webservices requests directly.
• Web-remoting RPC component that would enable a JS client to call an EJB method or a POJO method directly.
• Apache Abdera library for manipulating ATOM/RSS feeds
• JSON4J library on the server side to convert between JSON text and Java objects
• AJAX messaging to implement Server side push. This is totally cool. I always wanted to experiment with the CometD functionality available in DOJO and here the interation between the DOJO Message Bus (client) and Websphere Service Integration bus was provided out of the box :)

A good example showing Stock Quote Streaming can be found here.

Deep linking in AJAX applications

AJAX appplications face the challenge of deep-linking because many times the page URL does not change, only the content changes using AJAX.
And without deep linking, spiders and bots may not be able to index your page.

Currently there are 2 strategies for deep-linking AJAX sites:
- Using anchors. Onload, javascript checks location.href for an anchor and then calls the existing ajax methods to add and remove the appropriate content.
- place the stateful URL ("Link to this page") somewhere within the page, at a location and using a style that will become well-known conventions. Both Google Maps and MSN Earth follow this technique.

"Neither Google Maps nor MSN Virtual Earth records the state of a particular map view on the browser’s URL-line. Google Maps hides all the parameters. MSN Virtual Earth presents only a GUID whose purpose I don’t yet understand, but which doesn’t record the map’s state. In both cases, the stateful URL is found elsewhere than on the URL-line. Google Maps presents it directly, with a link icon and a Link to this page label. MSN Virtual Earth presents it indirectly — clicking Permalink leads to a popup window containing the stateful URL."

FCKeditor

Came across this beautiful AJAX control that can be used to emulate a HTML editor text box.

http://www.fckeditor.net/ - worth a look.