Refactoring of a GUI prototype using AJAX - Improve the performance of a GUI prototype by introducing an AJAX framework.

Abstract: The problem given from the company XDIN was to improve an existing Java EE webapplication prototype which handles errands specified for the energy branch. Since theprototype had a slow work process and a slow response time, the company wants the newsystem to be implemented with AJAX and DWR. Furthermore, the task was also to examineif it is beneficial to use other AJAX frameworks, in excess of DWR. Since there are manydifferent frameworks the review was limited to include two of the frameworks that are in thefrontline, DOJO and YUI.A lot of different technologies were used, such as JSP, JS, HTML, AJAX, DOJO, YUI, EJB,Struts, SQL and CSS (Cascading Style Sheet). Therefore the first step was to learn all thedifferent technologies by reading tutorials and API’s and attending workshops. The secondstep was to understand the requirements of the system. Development of the code was doneusing both Eclipse and IntelliJ, and for testing the UI, a tool called firebug was used.DWR is a framework that advocates asynchronous communication and makes it possible todo lightweight server roundtrips without any complete page refresh. By the very nature of theframework, the response times were improved.All three JavaScript libraries have pros and cons. DOJO has a lot of features and gives theimpact of being a library to trust because of its diversity. However, since there is nodocumentation or complete API it makes it really difficult and cumbersome to use. The keyfeature with a JavaScript library should be ease of use, and by that also a time saver todevelop with when compared to other frameworks or no framework at all. DOJO lacks inthese areas, and is not the framework of choice largely because of these. The YUI on the otherhand not only has a lot of features, but comes with a comprehensive API complemented withexamples and cheat sheets. As a result of the drawbacks of DOJO the choice was to use YUIas a primary JavaScript Library and to use YUI ext as an extension