Creating an AJAX Portal in ASP.NET

Modern Internet portals, such as "bbc.co.uk" and "iGoogle.com", support user centric drag and drop customisation and are common place today. Luckily ASP.NET 3.5 makes them easy to create.

An AJAX Portal is a web site that allows users to create their own homepage by dragging and dropping widgets onto the page.

A widget is part of a web page that comes with its own user interface and is designed to carry out a specific function. Widgets are designed to cover all kinds of functionality including: Personal calendar, address books, contact lists, stock tickers, weather reports and so on.

Users have complete control over what they see on their page and, indeed, where on the page they want to see it. They can also control the general appearance of their web site by selecting from different colours and themes. Administrators can control which widgets each individual user is allowed to see and can force the display of important widgets such as company news.

An essential part of the usability of any customisable portal are the AJAX calls that keep track of the users actions without continually refreshing the web page. AJAX is a technology where JavaScript code in the web page makes separate calls to the web server to send and retrieve XML data.

AJAX web sites like this are non trivial to develop. JavaScript libraries such as JQuery help with the construction of the client code, but this still leaves the creation of the code on the server which needs to:

• Have a seamless and easy-to-use interface with AJAX
• Be efficient so it can cope with thousands of users dragging and dropping widgets at the same time
• Have a development methodology that is familiar to server side developers so as to avoid steep learning curves

ASP.NET 3.5 provides support for all of the above including:

• Full support for JQuery
• AJAX.NET to support seamless AJAX calls from client to server
• Simplified creation of Web Services
• Full support for XML queries using LINQ to XML
• Easy access to the database using LINQ to SQL

When Ballard Chalmers were presented with the challenge of developing the Student.NET portal for the 15,000 students studying at Canterbury Christ Church University we selected ASP.NET 3.5, JQuery and Microsoft SQL Server 2008.

Glossary:

JQuery - a JavaScript library that simplifies dynamic HTML programming

ASP.NET - Active Server Pages .NET - Microsoft's .NET based web development framework

AJAX - Asynchronous JavaScript and XML - A JavaScript development technique that allows XML data to be requested from a server with refreshing a web page

AJAX.NET - A simple to use implementation of AJAX for use in .NET

LINQ - Language Integrated Query - Allows data queries to be executed directly in any .NET programming language. Can be used to access Microsoft SQL Server databases (LINQ to SQL) and XML (LINQ to XML)

If you would like to talk to us about any of the technologies mentioned in this article please contact Andrew Chalmers on andrew.chalmers@ballardchalmers.com or call 01342 410223.

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