PAWS Engine

aheadOffice introduces PAWS - a new efficient and highly functional engine based on AJAX for building of interactive Web 2.0 systems. PAWS allows to construct and deploy dynamic and content rich web applications in a matter of days.

DOM and low level JavaScript operations

Routine DOM operations such as creation and attaching objects, handling events and other tricks with the DOM-tree. For example, with the help of Fur - a PAWS module for HTML forms creation, building of smart and attractive HTML forms with complex logic becomes simple and fast. It supports standard and user-defined validation routines, triggers and events reactions which grant the forms with ability to behave dynamically, have tabs, folding areas, enable, disable or hide fields or form areas. From the developers' side a form is a single XML file that fully describes the form properties, look and behaviour. After Fur processes the file the application receives a ready JavaScript object.

Scalability

PAWS is a plugin-ready engine. That means you can extend any part of it to any kind of functionality you'd ever need. There are already a lot of plugins that are parts of PAWS distribution. Any of them can be immediately used, e.g. the DatePicker or ColorPickerwhich come in Fur module, tabs or folded blocks.

AJAX requests handling

For the purpose of handling AJAX requests PAWS presents JTransfer module. It supports synschronous and well as asynchronous requests, and allows to send and receive structured XML-compatible data.

Widgets

Widgets are visible DOM objects with a complex behavior. It can be a window-like object (like PAWS Dialog), or a built-in-page static object (like sortable table), a color or date picker, or anything else. Using standard constructors, creation of a complex widget which can be a even micro-application itself, becomes a matter of minutes.

Compatibility

PAWS is a cross-platform solution. Basing on pure JAvaScript it has been fully tested on Windows, Linux and Mac platforms under Internet Explorer 6+, Mozilla Firefox 1.5+ and Safari 3+ browsers.

Visual design

All design elements, colors and looks are done using pure CSS. To completely change look of your applications you don't need to know JavaScript at all. Customization of color scheme takes not more than a day of beginning web master who understands CSS, complete customization of elements shape, spacing, fonts and colors will take not more than 2-3 days. A professional HTML and CSS programmer would customize all this on the fly.

Speed

All data requested from server via AJAX can be cached with Resolver module and used by multiple functions as many times as necessary. At any moment the cached data can be refreshed on demand. It doesn't matter wich piece of code requested the refresh - all depending data in your HTML/JavaScript will be refreshed automaticaly. Fur forms are also submitted using AJAX so a submission doesn't require page reload. All data in forms is transferred in a native way, so any type of forms data not supported by original XMLHttpRequest (like local files) can be safely sent in PAWS.

Visual effects and animation

Mutation module provides smooth animation of HTML objects from one style to another. It includes floating or transforming objects, smooth font or color change, opacity, disappearing and other things.

API

For those people from web development sphere might be interesting the engine documentation page, where we describe general concepts and the API. Please note that the manual is not completed yet.