Introduction to XataJax

Xataface 1.3 comes with a new module XataJax which comes installed standard. XataJax serves as a foundation for Javascript/AJAX powered Xataface applications and will hopefully usher in a new fresh generation of Xataface powered applications.

Features

Xataface provides pieces of infrastructure:

1. A Javascript/CSS Compiler & Linker
2. A Javascript component library & API

The Javascript/CSS Compiler & Linker

Web 2.0 and HTML 5 is a great platform for application development, but it presents a challenge when it comes to developing large-scale, robust applications. It can be difficult to manage applications that consist of dozens or even hundrends of javascript libraries, some of which depend on each other.

The XataJax compiler provides a solution to this problem by providing a just-in-time compilation of all of the javascripts that are necessary to service a particular request. It doesn't actually compile your Javascript into machine code, it just aggregates and minifies all of the javascript code together into a single file at runtime so that you don't have to worry about figuring out exactly which libraries you need to import in each template.

This has 2 key benefits:

1. Load time. By having all of the scripts grouped into a single file, it is much quicker for the client to load the your scripts.

2. Code organization. Since the compiler will automatically resolve the script dependencies, you can keep your code nicely organized, which produces a far more maintainable source code base.

The Javascript Component Library & API

The 2nd part of the XataJax module is a new API that will help you develop rich Web 2.0 applications that interact with your database. The will allow you to build forms more dyanmically with Javascript, or load, update, and delete records directly using a javascript API.

The goal is to eventually expose all important Xataface functionality via the XataJax API.

Additional modules may build on top of this API to produce alternative dynamic interfaces for Xataface using existing web UI component libraries like JQueryUI or Sencha.