Lately there has been much discussion about AJAX and PeopleSoft so I thought its worth writing about in this blog. The Ajax I am speaking of is not a scrubbing compound. Rather, it is a way of programming for the Web that gets rid of the hourglass or the need to refresh the entire page.

You know what I mean. For example, when you’re in a PeopleSoft application and you change a value in a field and tab to the next field, you sometimes see the blinking Processing in the upper right corner, followed by a refresh of the entire page you are working with. If you implement AJAX technology into your PeopleSoft page, your data, content, and design can be merged together into a seamless whole. Then, when your user clicks on something on an Ajax driven application, there is very little lag time. The page simply displays what they're asking for.

The term AJAX, originally coined by Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path in his essay AJAX: A New Approach To Web Applications, is an acronym for “Asynchronous
JavaScript And XML.” I know that’s a bit of a mouthful, but it’s simply describing
a technique that uses JavaScript to refresh a page’s contents from a web server
without having to reload the entire page. This is different from the traditional
method of updating data and objects in web pages, which requires the browser to refresh the entire page in order to display any changes to the content.

There are many web applications that use AJAX today. Some of which you probably use on a regular basis. For example Google Maps is a web application with AJAX capabilities. When you are using Google Maps you can scroll around or click and drag the map to navigate around. When you do this, you will see how the map updates right before your eyes without refreshing the page. There is very little lag and you don't have to wait for pages to refresh or reload.

In PeopleSoft a full page refresh for a FieldChange event is very expensive. While there is not currently a way to update the component buffer using AJAX, you can use it to grab and display information that would normally require the user to navigate to another page. You can do this without modifying and delivered code.

AJAX frameworks provide the infrastructure required to post data to the server without requiring a full page refresh. Furthermore, AJAX frameworks can update a portion of a page with the results of a server operation.

I am just beginning to play around with AJAX inside of PeopleSoft, however, there are some great examples of what you can do with AJAX and PeopleSoft. For example, here is a flash video you can watch, that shows you a company directory search using AJAX inside of PeopleSoft. Click Here To Watch

Here is another great example with code that shows you how to implement Live Search capablities to PeopleSoft Enterprise applications. Go Here To View It

Using AJAX within PeopleSoft applications is very powerful and really adds robust features to your applications. I've heard, through my sources, that Oracle is adding AJAX capabilities into the next release of PeopleTools that will allow you to update the component buffer. This will give you the ability to add web 2.0 capabilities to your PeopleSoft applications. I don't know about you, but I am looking forward to these new enhancements.