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Playing with Backbase

'The New World Order is governed…''Some nice recognition'

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Thursday Dec 15 2005

If you've been experimenting with AJAX techniques you'll probably know the name Backbase unless you've been living under a rock. Backbase is an innovative company from Amsterdam offering the most advanced Ajax framework on the planet. Besides being highly advanced, Backbase is also impressively feature complete and very well documented. Just about any gui component you can think of is available for use in fully AJAX savy web applications. Since Backbase Community Edition is a pure Javascript solution you can use any programming language you like with it.

Backbase

Probably a bit less well-known is the fact that Backbase is offering it's full client edition at no charge at all for non-commercial applications. That's right, it's free, as long as you don't earn any money with your software or website. In case you do you're required to purchase a license. This means most bloggers like me can do interesting things with it such as spicing up their weblogs. This is exactly what I'm doing as a first experiment with Backbase.

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I'm currently working on a new live-archives plugin for Pivot (and in the future WordPress too) powered by Backbase Community Edition. What I already love about Backbase after messing around for just a couple of hours is the ease of use. Using xajax there's very little javascript to be written as you may remember from my tutorial on it. Still you'll have to design everything yourself as xajax will only do the Ajax functionality and not much else. With Backbase there's no javascript to be programmed AND no design work to be done ^* which resulted in getting a working prototype for my new plugin done in less than one hour! So if you like exploring all things AJAX just like me you should really check it out. Oh yeah, it actually has documentation and examples too! Not having to 'guess' functionality and develop by trial-and-error is definitely refreshing for a change.

Once my live archives plugin is fully done I will release it to the public and write an in-depth article on how I got started with Backbase. For now you can check out the first (perfectly working) prototype of my new live archive plugin for Pivot, powered by Backbase Community Edition. Mind you, it's only 10% done. The final version will have everything one could possibly want from a live archives plugin, including interaction with my Taggerati tags plugin. Stay tuned!

Check out the live archives page!
get Backbase Community Edition and start hacking away!

Some tags: backbase, ajax, javascript.

^* Of course you CAN completely 'skin' a Backbase application. However, all stock components look absolutely great which means you can start focusing on functionality immediately.

small update:The demo is not really a demo anymore. I've added it to the site's main structure. Click on the live archives option in the main menu to access it!

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Commentary

Join the discussion! Leave a comment through the comment form below!

At 15 December '05 - 02:15 Bastiaan Terhorst wrote:
I don’t know. It feels really bloated and slow. And it doesn’t work with Safari, what’s up with that?

I’ll stick to prototype for now.
At 15 December '05 - 03:24 Marco wrote:
I didn’t test it with Safari yet.

But ehm… you can’t really compare this to Prototype.js. Prototype is just a javascript library that eases the Javascript part of an AJAX application. Other than that you’ll have to hand-code everything yourself while Backbase is a fully featured gui toolkit with all Ajax stuff built in. Seems only logical that adds more ‘bloat’ than just a thin javascript layer like Prototype.js
At 15 December '05 - 11:10 Marco wrote:
I just got rid of a lot of the slowness. It turned out to be loading all gui components there are. It can be setup to only load those components that you actually use. It should be a lot faster now! I did some customization on the UI as well. It’s still not perfect in MSIE 6 but hey, can’t have everything at once eh?
At 15 December '05 - 12:06 Khevor wrote:
Hmmm… I can see where this application would have a lot of uses – especially for bloggers where archived entries and the ability to search them are important. I did find that it took several seconds to initially load. That could be a drawback but I do agree that something better needs to be in place for Pivot’s archives. Your Taggerati helps in that regard (a plugin I have yet to use, though) and mingled with this new thing you’re working on should really add a lot more ease of functionality. The only thing is, it has to be kept simple and small, otherwise the average Pivot user will be leary about using it (although I think you know that already so sorry for stating the obvious).
At 15 December '05 - 13:32 Bram wrote:
Wow that looks really slick indeed. I really gotta find some time to dig deeper into all the AJAX ‘nonsense’
Maybe in the upcoming holidays, till then, I’ll just wait and see what you come up with. Can’t wait to try out new goodies for pivot, since not much seems to be happening on the ‘official’ pivot level …
At 16 December '05 - 03:08 Max Roeleveld wrote:
Great as it may be, it simply doesn’t work in Safari. End of story for me, there. Yes, I can fire up Firefox, but Safari just happens to be the browser of choice (at this moment, at least), and I wouldn’t launch another browser just to see somebody’s archives.

You might want to check out Michael Heilemann’s archives, as they totally 0wnz. Also available as a WordPress plugin here and here …
At 16 December '05 - 03:46 Marco wrote:
I agree on the fact that lack of Safari support is a serious issue. I asked about that on Menno van Slooten’s blog (he’s a Backbase employee). I hope they’ll make an effort to make Backbase work on Safari. It’s a modern browser and most ajax stuff I’ve ever done works in it so I guess it should be possible.

I agree the one on Michael Heileman’s site kicks ass. My plugin will eventually have all this stuff in it as well but I guess it will take some time to finish it
At 16 December '05 - 12:38 Jep Castelein wrote:
Safari support is high on our priority list. There are still some issues with Safari’s JavaScript implementation, and we’re working together with Apple to solve this as quickly as possible.

To speed up the initialization of Backbase you can turn on GZip compression on your webserver (e.g. mod_deflate on Apache 2). It will reduce the download size by a factor 3. And indeed, the dynamic widget loading also improves the initialization speed.
At 17 December '05 - 08:38 Marco wrote:
Great news! Safari is definitely important I think because a lot of early adopters and promotors of ‘cool stuff’ such as Backbase are Safari users. It will help a lot I’m sure!

On another note: I implemented the second tab! You can now also browse the archives by category. Next stop is a search component and finally a tags component that snaps into the Taggerati plugin if installed.

Things are still kind of flakey in IE by the way. If there’s any (backbase employee?) who can tell me why I’d love to know!

Stay tuned!
At 18 December '05 - 10:26 Marco wrote:
I advanced quite a bit with this. It now has paging in order to prevent long lists, combo boxes for year, month and category in order to save screen real-estate and Backbase windows that open when you click an entry. The Backbase windows show the introduction of a posting.

In the meanwhile I found IE needs to run in quirks mode. The little on the backbase.com site reveals this. I’m not sure whether I like that. It means we can’t easily add backbase stuff to a page that must render in strict mode. IE also throws a weird Backbase error I don’t understand at this moment.

I’ll keep posting comments here as this little experiment is progressing. Once it’s fully done I’ll do a Backbase feature article here.

Keep checking the demo link. It’s being updated quite often with new nice stuff!
At 20 December '05 - 12:31 Ryan Brooks wrote:
Heh. Fancy that. My company is a reseller of Backbase.

http://www.backbase.com/#home/sales/rese..]

I also blogged about it every once and a while.

http://www.ryanbrooks.net/?cat=13
At 02 August '06 - 04:04 dghsdfgh wrote:
sfghdfghdfghdfgh
At 02 August '06 - 04:06 bill wrote:
hello all

One or more comments are waiting for approval by me.

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