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Unlike other AJAX frameworks that require users to hand-code, MX AJAX Toolbox integrates perfectly with Dreamweaver, bringing the benefits of AJAX to developers and designers alike. Because the product uses familiar Dreamweaver concepts, it has a lean learning curve, making it approachable by people of all skill levels.
A major concern of developers is that AJAX websites are typically not gracefully degradable: because they rely so heavily on JavaScript, they will provide only limited functionality or no functionality at all if JavaScript is turned off in the client's browser. MX AJAX Toolbox has successfully addressed this problem by implementing a fallback mechanism: whenever JavaScript is disabled or missing, the PHP server scripting language takes over the task of generating pages correctly and serving them to the client's browser or screen reader.
Graceful degradation is inherently provided by the platform for all AJAX sites and controls, so that developers will not have to duplicate the application logic in order to handle both environments (JavaScript enabled/disabled).
Because of the way the platform was designed, web applications built with MX AJAX Toolbox are accessible to screen readers and can be indexed by search engines such as Google.
This way, content will become available to people with disabilities and search engine ranking will not be affected by the added AJAX features.
In a typical AJAX website, browser navigation would not work as expected, because most page changes are triggered by various JavaScript events and functions, not by standard URL requests. Websites built with MX AJAX Toolbox successfully address this issue and can be bookmarked and browsed just like any other site, using the browser's Back and Forward buttons.
MX AJAX Toolbox encodes in the URL the exact state of the current page. This means you can save the current view of your site (each AJAX panel displaying a certain state) as a bookmark. For example, add it to your favorite sites list in Internet Explorer. When you access the bookmark later on, an accurate snapshot of your site will be displayed.
MX AJAX Toolbox is a Dreamweaver extension that relies on a JavaScript library of reusable objects and methods known as the AJAX Kore. Before this core was put together, the MX AJAX Toolbox engineering team carefully researched and compared all major open-source JavaScript libraries available on the web, including Yahoo! User Interface Library, Prototype, script.aculo.us, and Dojo.
We carefully evaluated the advantages and disadvantages of each library, in order decide which implementation would benefit MX AJAX Toolbox most. Finally, we decided to build AJAX Kore around some elements from Yahoo! User Interface Library, some elements from Prototype, as well as several methods and objects developed by the InterAKT engineering team.
The AJAX Kore library is in many ways better than other available JavaScript libraries, in that:
It is solid. The library's core functions have been tested by thousands of developers around the world, in different environments and on different frameworks.
It is compact. No one really likes uploading a lot of files from Dreamweaver to their remote servers. Unlike Dojo or other implementations, we tried to keep the overall size of AJAX Kore to a minimum.
It is extensible. The core was built around popular AJAX patterns, such as AJAX stub, AJAX micro content and AJAX micro link, in order to provide developers with the easiest way to extend it. This means that new functions can be added to it in order to provide advanced operations in your AJAX site.
Another concern with AJAX sites is their ability to be indexed by search engines. With MX AJAX Toolbox, this is not a concern anymore. Sites built with this product are available for indexing.
Developers also have the option to specify the meta description and meta keywords for the main panel states.
Dreamweaver developers with a bit of programming knowledge can use web services built-in the platform to call a server-side function or object method from JavaScript and asynchronously send a response back to the client. Using the AJAX Web Service Wizard, developers can build a variety of form validation routines, such as checking if a username already exists on the user registration form.
These routines will work in real-time, before actually submitting the form to the server.
With MX AJAX Toolbox, users can drag and drop database records to reorder them or put them into categories. For instance, they can put photos into albums or arrange products in a product catalog by their importance.
MX AJAX Toolbox works on Dreamweaver MX 2004 (7.0.1) and Dreamweaver 8. It can run on computers with Microsoft Windows (XP, 2000, 98, 2003) or Mac OS X 10.2+.
The current version supports thePHP_MySQL andPHP_ADODB server models.
Sites generated with the toolbox will render seamlessly on the most popular web browsers:Firefox 1.5+
Mozilla 1.3+
Safari
Internet Explorer 6.x, 7
You can use the extension with various databases (including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Access and Oracle), to build AJAX websites with dynamic content. Click here for the full compatibility sheet.