NetAdvantage® ASP.NET Controls Employ AJAX and Support Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX Extensions

Infragistics first delivered AJAX features in October 2004, well before the term "AJAX" was coined. Since the initial release, Infragistics has been adding to the list of its AJAX-enabled components, including the much heralded WebAsyncRefreshPanel (a.k.a., WARP container), which added AJAX capabilities to virtually any ASP.NET control. Some other notable AJAX-based features are:

  • Our Aikido™ Framework became a part of our NetAdvantage ASP.NET controls in 2008 and was designed from the ground-up to provide users with highly responsive, lightweight, AJAX controls such as the WebSplitter™, WebImageViewer™, WebDialogWindow™ and more to come.
  • Our WebGrid™ features XML Load-On-Demand to empower users requesting large volumes of data on an only as requested basis. This protocol allows pages to load much more quickly as they grab only the data that is required.
  • These same performance gains can be realized with our WebTree™, thanks to its AJAX-powered Load-On-Demand feature, also used in the WebTab™ (e.g., what you see within My Keys and Downloads on the Infragistics Web site).
  • Users can perform updates to their data via AJAX in our WebGrid without having to refresh the entire page, and important point in data-intensive distributed applications.
  • The WebCombo™ provides AJAX-powered type ahead completion for quickly finding records within a lengthy list.
  • The WebSchedule™ set of controls makes extensive use of AJAX to create a very responsive Outlook feel on the Web.
  • All of these controls are packaged with our NetAdvantage ASP.NET controls in the NetAdvantage for .NET, NetAdvantage Select or NetAdvantage for Web Client products, and you can see these and more features in action inthe AJAX set of demos on our ASP.NET Samples Browser.

Microsoft's ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions

For quite some time, Microsoft has been working on an AJAX framework for developers to useon theASP.NET platform. Branded collectively "Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions"during the fall of 2006, Microsoft published a full-fledged product roadmap that partitioned the platform's early AJAX support into several different pieces.

  • ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions - This is the product name for Microsoft's server-side additions to ASP.NET 2.0 that better enable AJAX-related development on the Web platform. The key components in this architecture are Microsoft's ScriptManager and UpdatePanel components. NetAdvantage ASP.NET controls by Infragistics fully support use within the UpdatePanel.
  • Microsoft AJAX Library - This is the client-side (meaning that it runs inside the browser) library upon which Microsoft's ASP.NET extensions are built and upon which other developers can build better AJAX-based applications. This library would function with non-Microsoft server-side technologies (such as PHP) precisely because it is was entirely browser-based (perhaps the key selling point for Web applications today). NetAdvantage ASP.NET controlsare fully compatible with this library.
  • ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit - This set of shared source controls was initially coordinated by Microsoft and has been contributed toby many developers in the community (it is now hosted on Codeplex). These controls employ the Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions, the Microsoft AJAX Library and most recently the ASP.NET 3.5 Framework. As this toolkit constantly changes with the introduction of newly contributed code, the NetAdvantage ASP.NET controls are not supported nor tested with the AJAX Control Toolkit.
  • ASP.NET AJAXCTP/Futures - These were tentative releases of primordial features that did make the first cut for Microsoft's ASP.NET AJAX architecture and has been therefore subject to flux based on their ongoing development by Microsoft. Infragistics continues to keep abreast of future developments with AJAX technology.

Microsoft's ASP.NET 3.5 and the Infragistics Aikido Framework

Microsoft ASP.NET 3.5 and the Infragistics Aikido Framework are two great technologies that work great together. Prior to ASP.NET 3.5, Web developers had to download and install the pieces of the MS AJAX stack described above.This all culminated with the ASP.NET 3.5 Framework so that you now can get all of the AJAX-related classes integrated into the compiled assemblies of the .NET Framework without having to install additional extensions. The benefit of enabling and deploying turnkey AJAX-enabled Web applications on the ASP.NET platform becomes clear with the ASP.NET 3.5 Framework. If you have ASP.NET 3.5 deployed, you can use NetAdvantage ASP.NET controls built against the 3.5 version of the platform and you do not require Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions to be installed in order to obtain all of the new AJAX features and functionality added by our new ASP.NET AJAX controls.

Aikido Framework Architecture

The above diagram shows how new NetAdvantage ASP.NET controls are based upon the Aikido Framework, and how the Aikido Framework itself enhances and exposes the innate AJAX capabilities on either the ASP.NET 2.0/Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions 1.0 stack or the entirely self-sufficient ASP.NET 3.5 Framework. This gives you the ultimate flexibility to use our ASP.NET AJAX controls on either ASP.NET 2.0 or ASP.NET 3.5, whichever platform you have deployed to your Web server.

 

Why AJAX is Important

Quite simply, AJAX enables a much better user experience for Web sites and applications. Developers can now provide user interfaces that are nearly as responsive and rich as more traditional Windows Forms applications while taking advantage of the Web's innate ease of deployment and heterogeneous, cross-platform nature. These benefits have been shown to dramatically reduce software maintenance costs and increase its reach. You can use AJAX to only load the portions of pages that change, so users can see the main left-hand side navigation on our Web site, or browse our Perspectives independently of the rest of the site content.

 

AJAX Technology Backgrounder

Though it’s simply a combination of relatively mature technologies, AJAX (or Asynchronous Javascript and XML), has emerged as a popular industry solution that allows developers to combine existing Web technologies to create highly interactive and responsive Web interfaces. AJAX as a technology has been around for quite some time; it is just the name that is new. Microsoft’s Outlook Web Access is a good example of the technology in use before it was dubbed AJAX. This simple acronym, combined with the highly visible implementation of the technology by Google (maps.google.com, gmail.google.com, etc.), Microsoft (www.live.com), and others, has put a spotlight on AJAX as the key to good user experience on the Web. The following is a simple diagram that highlights some key concepts that underpin the AJAX message exchange pattern.

 

AJAX message exchange pattern.