Backbase is pleased to announce the publication of Backbase 4 RIA Development, a book about the Client Framework written by Ghica van Emde Boas and Sergey Ilinsky.

There is an old saying that expresses the difficulty of trying to match things that inherently do not match: "Try to fit round pegs into square holes". In IT circles, the saying became popular to describe the difficulty of storing objects created in an object-oriented programming language such as Java, in a relational database table.

If you think about it, this is exactly what many AJAX developers try to do: fit round JavaScript objects in square HTML tags. The Backbase framework solves this problem by allowing you to write JavaScript code that is encapsulated as data within XML tags, using its innovative Tag Definition Language (TDL). This causes the pieces of JavaScript that you need in your application to become smaller and easier to write. The problem of unwanted global objects interfering in unexpected ways with other parts of your application, or with other frameworks that you may want to use, is solved in this way too.

To explain all this in detail, a new book appeared:

Backbase 4 RIA Development, written by Ghica van Emde Boas and Sergey Ilinsky, both former empoyees of Backbase.

This book is intended to make you an expert in using the Backbase framework. It covers just enough of AJAX, XML, XHTML, namespaces, XPath, CSS, and the Document Object Model (DOM) to make the Backbase framework easier to use, and to understand why Backbase is built like it is. In this way, you can increase your knowledge of the core client web technologies and how they relate to each other. You can compare Backbase against other frameworks and technologies and decide which parts to use.

Significant attention is given in the book to architectural aspects of designing a web-application, showing sample applications using a model-view-controller approach. PHP is used as the server scripting language, because it is quick to set up and the source code can be very compact. Java developers will be able to understand PHP code easily because of its familiar C-like syntax.

You can download a free chapter, chapter 2, which explains the Backbase UI Tag Library (BTL).