4.9. Use Case for Downloading: An Intranet Web Site

A large amount of Web development is focused inward and is used to power company portals, content management systems, and myriad other applications. These applications are perfect places to deploy AJAX because they usually provide a high-bandwidth, homogeneous environment. The homogeneous environment aids in testing because you have fewer browsers to test against. In addition, the high bandwidth allows you to pull in any tool you need without much fear of increasing download times to an unacceptable level. These characteristics open up a huge number of possibilities when choosing an AJAX library; you may even choose to combine several to get the mix of features and the APIs that best suit your needs.

Internal sites generally have high levels of interactivity and may be the main application used by large numbers of employees. This is especially true within many content-management systems. They have many areas that can be enhanced through the use of AJAX, especially in the editing process. Commonly, content-management systems add in AJAX-based autosaves to keep authors from losing content. AJAX-based editing that allows for quick processing is also useful. Any powerful application will have many different places where AJAX makes sense, and these areas will have a variety of different communication patterns. The applications may also be enhanced by a variety of additional features. For instance, a content-management system may find drag-and-drop ordering of articles to be especially useful. Any application may also benefit from graphical fade effects that notify users that an action has taken place.

As you can see, an intranet Web site needs an AJAX library or multiple libraries that provide many types of features. The library needs to provide a communications layer that tightly couples with the backend programming language and framework while also covering different development patterns. These patterns range from buffering search requests on a find-as-you-type system to providing timed updates on an autosave system. Then, the library needs to provide graphical effects that can enhance ease of use; these can include features ranging from a visual effects library for fading in new HTML elements to a drag-and-drop ordering system. Writing a library that provides all these features can be a huge undertaking; this makes looking to prebuilt libraries a great solution.