According to our trusty encyclopedia, the Atlas of Mythology:
... fought on the side of the Titans in the war with the gods of Mount Olympus, Zeus punished him with the burden of carrying the heavens upon his shoulders.
Apparently Microsoft is now taking on the mantle of Atlas - namely making authoring AJAX apps easier. So my post last month, ASP.NET 2.0 Includes AJAX, is starting to look prophetic. ;) After all, the heart of AJAX is the call-back!
ASP.NET 2.0 includes a new feature, called asynchronous client callbacks, that makes it easy to build ASP.NET pages that update their content from the server without requiring a page roundtrip. Asynchronous client callbacks wrap XMLHTTP, and work on a variety of browsers. ASP.NET itself includes several controls that use callbacks, including client-side paging and sorting in the GridView and DetailsView controls, and supporting virtual lists of items in the TreeView control. You can learn more about callbacks on Bertrand Le Roy’s blog.
So, as I said, ASP.NET 2.0 was and is supporting AJAX, but today Scott Guthrie (ASP.NET/IIS7 PM) has announced that the Atlas Framework will make it even easier. Integration between IIS7 and ASP.NET 2.0 controls will be even richer with this post 2.0 released addition to the framework.
Atlas will be the framework that Microsoft recommends to write the JavaScript that makes asynchronous callbacks possible. This framework will essentially emit the proxy and the plumbing code so you can focus on what you want to build - not how it's done. Scott claims that troubleshooting will be easier, and like the goal of 2.0 the amount of code you write by hand will be dramatically reduced. According to Scott:
The Atlas Client Script Framework will include the following components:
- An extensible core framework that adds features to JavaScript such as lifetime management, inheritance, multicast event handlers, and interfaces
- A base class library for common features such as rich string manipulation, timers, and running tasks
- A UI framework for attaching dynamic behaviors to HTML in a cross-browser way
- A network stack to simplify server connectivity and access to web services
- A set of controls for rich UI, such as auto-complete textboxes, popup panels, animation, and drag and drop
- A browser compatibility layer to address scripting behavior differences between browsers.
Naturally, I'm concerned about changes to JavaScript and the effects to cross-platform development but all in all it sounds like they are willing to address that as well. Scott promises a “developer preview“ of Atlas on ASP.NET 2.0 and more info at the PDC. I can't wait!!