While the programming world is in a mad rush to develop complete applications written in JavaScript alone, a few companies are able to claim that they were hacking JavaScript long before the acronym AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) appeared. Few have more history than General Interface, a company acquired by Tibco one year ago. General Interface started distributing its JavaScript toolkit in 2001, and now Tibco is slowly rolling out Version 3.1.
The system is a complete set of GUI widgets that will run in Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The completely browser-based IDE is written in the same set of widgets, itself serving as one of several very good examples of what the toolkit can do. There are panes within panes to hold the source code, and many of these panes come with multiple tabs, multiple views, accordion tabs, and even some graphs. All of this is loaded from an HTML file, not an executable.
The richness of the interface is surprising. It's easy to build resizable panes -- something that used to seem impossible to do with HTML, at least to me. In the early years, many of General Interface's customers were pharmaceutical researchers, and the company developed a number of slick tricks for fitting plenty of data into what is still technically just a single Web page. These pages can provide inspiration if you're trying to jam a large amount of data into one dashboard for your clients.
"Web page," however, isn't exactly the right way to describe it because the HTML file is really just a wormhole into another dimension running in the JavaScript interpreter. A few simple script tags start up the main JavaScript library, which loads an XML description of the application. As does competitor Backbase, General Interface uses XML as an intermediate language: The JavaScript code on the local browser turns this XML into the HTML actually displayed. Another competitor, JackBe, stores the application as JavaScript, a technique that avoids XML and the need for parsing it.
Is one approach better than the other? Both seem to work quite well, and there's no noticeable performance differences in the standard-size applications I built. Some may prefer the XML for its relative crispness and harmony with the structure. GUIs are naturally hierarchical, a perfect match for the treelike rigor of XML. I personally like JackBe's JavaScript-only approach, if only because it's a bit simpler, hacker-friendly, and perhaps even a bit more flexible in odd cases.
In any case, many users of Tibco's General Interface won't be spending much time with the underlying XML. Although the IDE kindly offers an "expert" window for editing the XML code, most developers will probably stick with the visual drag-and-drop tools. These offer all of the conveniences of most graphical IDEs, something that will amaze anyone who picked up a bad impression of JavaScript from poorly coded Web sites.
| Test Center Scorecard | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 |  |  |  |  |  | |
| 30% | 30% | 15% | 15% | 10% | ||
| Tibco General Interface 3.1 | 9 | 9 | 8 | 9 | 8 |
8.8
Very Good
|
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