| Introduction | Deployment Architecture (Ajax .Net Engine) | |
Ajax Web Deployment
Ajax is a thin-client web-based application deployment technique, which utilises the browser's ability to execute JavaScript code to generate/update the HTML user interface and synchronise it with its application server. This is in contrast with conventional thin-client deployment methods where, the server delivers complete HTML pages to be simply rendered by the client browser.
Benefits of Ajax deployment
By not requiring the server to deliver a new HTML page each time the user makes a change, the load on the application server is greatly reduced, thus enabling significantly higher performance / load to be obtained from the same application server. This benefit is maximised where a single web page performs many functions and requires many interactions with the user.
Use of the Ajax technique by Knowledge Builder
Each Knowledge Builder Dialog Object is generated as a single HTML page with embedded JavaScript code (which is posted by the server once when the Dialog is encountered during inference). Until this Dialog is exited, any changes the user makes effecting the display of the web page, are performed by the client's browser, which also posts messages back to the application server to updates the session data and perform any required inferences (Constraints, Macros, Events, etc). Where possible, the WYSIWYG dialog design is faithfully reproduced (in HTML) by the Ajax JavaScript.