Taconite 1.0, an Apache-licensed open source framework that simplifies Ajax development, has been released. Taconite consists of a client-side javascript library that reads an XML document via AJAX, which tells the client side how to render a specific operation. It also has a set of JSP tags to easily construct the clientside operations, although the XML can be constructed without JSP as well.
Taconite is based on concepts from the W3C DOM Level 3 Load and Save specification. Taconite aids in the development of Ajax-enabled applications by allowing the developer to specify new or updated content as XHTML, and automatically updates the current Web page's DOM based the XHTML content As such, Taconite eliminates the need to write document.createElement and document.appendChild statements to update the DOM, common in many AJAX libraries, thus avoiding the occasionally problematic innerHTML property and specific browser quirks.
The Taconite client-side library encapsulates the details of creating the XMLHttpRequest object, building the query string that is sent to the server as part of the request, and the handling of the server response. Using Taconite, an Ajax request can be created and sent with four lines of JavaScript code.
Unlike some other frameworks, Taconite can be used with any server side technology, be it Java EE, .Net, PHP, and others. As long as the server can generate some XML, it can be used with Taconite, although a JSP tag library is supplied.
