Hosted application scrubs up with AJAX

Nsite, a hosted-applications company, is expected on Tuesday to introduce tools to customize its online sales application, and it's relying heavily on AJAX, a Web development technique.

The company is expected to debut two new sales-related application services: Nsite Channel Management and Nsite Quote Management.

As part of the release, Nsite has introduced software that allows users to customize Nsite's services or to create new ones from a library of existing services. The tools, called the Web Services Builder, provide a visual design tool aimed at business analysts rather than software programmers.

With Web Services Builder, a person can create interactive applications using AJAX, a set of Web standards for building interactive Web pages. The tool automatically generates JavaScript code and handles connections to third-party applications.

Nsite is using the Web Services Builder and AJAX tooling to build its own hosted applications.

The emergence of popular consumer applications, such as GoogleMaps, has driven interest in AJAX-style applications. But more business applications will use AJAX to increase interactivity in Web front-ends and tap into server-based data, said NSite CEO Bob Jandro.

"Richness and high customization has been the last barrier to cross (for hosted business applications), and AJAX has been a facilitator of that," Jandro said.

Salesforce.com, which also sells hosted sales applications, introduced support for AJAX in some of its Salesforce Service & Support applications, which were introduced last month.

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The development framework will never be the same

As AJAX gives Web applications a fresh look, the cost of developing AJAX applications is threatening its success.

That is the reason we founded the ZK project: make AJAX transparent to app developers.

ZK is an open-source Web framework ( http://zk1.sourceforge.net ) and Live Demo at http://www.potix.com/zkdemo/userguide.