SmartClient is an Ajax framework

Ajax framework

In web application development, an Ajax framework is a framework which leverages Ajax, a collection of technologies for building dynamic web pages on the client side...

 created by Isomorphic Software. First released in 2001, SmartClient has been integrated into products from major software vendors including Informatica

Informatica

Informatica Corporation is a NASDAQ listed company with ticker INFA. Founded in 1993, its headquarters is in Redwood City, California. Founded by Diaz Nesamoney and Gaurav Dhillon...

 and Wily/CA, and has been deployed in thousands of enterprises. Since November 2007, SmartClient has been available free under an open source LGPL licence.

Overview

SmartClient provides:

• a broad set of GUI components, intended to allow complete applications to be developed without directly authoring HTML or using low-level Ajax techniques
• support for any server platform via integration with WSDL
  Web Services Description Language
  The Web Services Description Language is an XML-based language that is used for describing the functionality offered by a Web service. A WSDL description of a web service provides a machine-readable description of how the service can be called, what parameters it expects and what data structures...
  
  / RESTful
  Representational State Transfer
  Representational state transfer is a style of software architecture for distributed hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web. The term representational state transfer was introduced and defined in 2000 by Roy Fielding in his doctoral dissertation...
  
   web services, in XML and JSON
  JSON
  JSON , or JavaScript Object Notation, is a lightweight text-based open standard designed for human-readable data interchange. It is derived from the JavaScript scripting language for representing simple data structures and associative arrays, called objects...
  
   formats, directly from the browser, as well as special support for Java-based servers
• metadata-driven components which can bind to metadata formats such as XML schema, allowing a shared client-server data model with extensible types, validation rules and editing constraints
• Service-oriented architecture
  Service-oriented architecture
  In software engineering, a Service-Oriented Architecture is a set of principles and methodologies for designing and developing software in the form of interoperable services. These services are well-defined business functionalities that are built as software components that can be reused for...
  
  for new applications, as well as incremental enhancement of existing web applications via embedding SmartClient components inside existing HTML/CSS layouts
• Client-Server Integration: SmartClient browser-based applications interact with remote data and services via background communication channels. Background requests retrieve chunks of data rather than new HTML pages, and update your visual components in place rather than rebuilding the entire user interface.

External links

• SmartClient website. Home page has example browser with many SmartClient examples, with source code
• Browse SmartClient documentation
• Download SmartClient SDK