Hello.World

Zimbra released the AjaxTK JavaScript development library last year. Running under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) developers can use this toolkit in their browser-based applications. The toolkit is actively used by Zimbra in developing the Zimbra Collaboration Suite, one of the most full-featured AJAX applications I have ever seen. Because of it's development in conjunction with a real-world application, and because of the number of widgets and JavaScript utilities included, AjaxTK may well be one of the most advanced JavaScript toolkits available at the moment.

There is a problem however - there is basically no documentation for using AjaxTK, other than an extremely technical overview of the framework in PDF format. There are currrently no online examples of the widgets being used (other than the demo of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite itself). And while you can download the toolkit from Zimbra, their examples are heavily tied into JSP which is a major problem for me because I have no intention of using JSP.

So - here is a small step toward helping the community to get started. Full credit goes to Xiris, Chouser, Zuser and especially Smies for their posts on the Zimbra AjaxTK Forums.

AjaxTK Tree Example

open example here

This is a standard DHTML tree, but it also demonstrates Drag 'n' Drop and custom Tooltips. Try dragging a contact from the top branch onto the label of the second branch.

AjaxTK Grid Example

open example here

This is an extremely full-featured example. It demonstrates tabs and a grid that has resizable columns, movable columns and column sorting. You can filter the listings on the left (which is fully client-side). And the grid listings are paginated, allowing you to open 3 pages of listings in the grid.

Download Examples and AjaxTK Library

The above examples and the full source code are available for download in a ZIP file (466kb). Once again, thanks to Smies for getting this working.

So … what do you think? How does this compare to other AJAX libraries in your opinion? To be fair to Zimbra, they have only fairly recently released this toolkit to the community and it is yet early days (like most AJAX projects). They have some very positive thoughts on what AJAX libraries should be able to acheive in the future, so hopefully this is an indication of where they will take AjaxTK…

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 2nd, 2006 at 11:24 am and is filed under AJAX, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.