Leveraging the new Ajax features in IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory V6.0.1
IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory V6.0.1 gives WebSphere developers a toolset to speed their development. Each new version of the product gives you additional builders, many of which are designed to simplify incorporating an expanded set of Web features into your work. The latest version of the WebSphere Portlet Factory, release 6.0.1, provides builders you can use to simplify the addition of Ajax-based features. This article describes these new builders and demonstrates their usage through a sample portlet application. You should have a good understanding of building portlets using WebSphere Portlet Factory within either Eclipse or IBM Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software.
WebSphere Portlet Factory gives you a Rapid Application Development toolset for building portlets. It empowers you with new builders to add both Ajax- and Dojo-based features to your models. These builders provide support for rich user interface elements such as dragging and dropping objects within or across portlets, inline editing of portlet page views, and overlay or popup windows that display additional data as the mouse hovers over a specified region of the page.
This article provides a basic background on Ajax and Dojo, including their benefits in Web applications. The article illustrates how to incorporate new WebSphere Portlet Factory builders by describing the process of adding them to the sample music store portlet application.