jMaki "SpeedGeeking"

What is jMaki ?

If you have been following my blog, then you know it already. But a picture is worth a thousand words so here it is.

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One-liner: jMaki is a light-weight framework for building Web 2.0 applications. The "j" is for JavaScript and "Maki" means to wrap in Japanese. The logo is a Kanji symbol that means to wrap.

Three key points about jMaki:

1. Toolkits - It allows to create Ajax-enabled widgets and provide a JavaScript wrapper over widgets from existing toolkits such as Dojo, Yahoo, Script.acualo.us and many others. The key advantage is that it provides a standard data model for each widget such as DataTable, Tree and Menu. This shields the developer from dissimilar data models of these widgets from different toolkits.

2. Languages - jMaki-enabled web applications can be deployed on the Java platform, for example Java Server Pages (JSP) or Java Server Faces (JSF). They can also be deployed on Phobos - a server-side scripting environment that runs on the Java platform. And jMaki widgets can be embedded in PHP or Rails applications. It provides a natural format to the developers' language of choice.
3. Tools - jMaki comes with NetBeans and Eclipse plug-ins that allow you to drag/drop widgets in a page and generate the appropriate code fragments. And for non-IDE developers, there is an Ant task that allows you to create a project with the appropriate library dependencies.

This is my "speedgeeking" @ OSCON 2007.

And for those with a "serious" interest, I'm showing how some of the cool mashups are empowered by jMaki. Couple of them are available as screencasts at:

• Display RSS feed in jMaki widgets (running log mashup)
• jMaki: Visually appealing Views for Rails

And more videos will be available later.

日本語翻訳: Kana

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