What is Appcelerator

What is Appcelerator

Appcelerator is a fully-integrated RIA + SOA platform.

Appcelerator combines the usability benefits of Web 2.0-style, Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) with the reusability and flexibility of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). This combination results in a “client/server for the web” development style.

Message Oriented Architecture

All components in an Appcelerator application communicate via simple, lightweight messages. HTML elements can both send and receive messages and Appcelerator services are message-driven.

The diagram below demonstrates the flow for local messaging within the browser. There is one DIV element which generates the local message, and there are two other DIV elements which have subscribed to the local message. The Appcelerator Message Broker takes care of all of the message routing - both local and remote.

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This second diagram demonstrates the flow for remote messages. Remote messages can be sent to both HTML elements in the browser and to remote services. The Message Broker in the browser handles communication with the server-side Service Broker. The Service Broker is responsible for routing services and data marshalling. Our integrated services platform provides Service Brokers for Java, Ruby, PHP, .NET, Python and Perl.

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RIA Development

The Appcelerator RIA platform enables you to rapidly build RIAs using standard HTML and CSS. There are three key enabling technologies within the RIA platform:

  • Web Expression Language
  • RIA Widget Framework
  • RIA Message Broker

The Web Expression Language turns standard HTML elements into dynamic RIA components. It integrates the three major RIA programming tasks: event handling, DOM manipulation and Ajax. The Web Expression Language is used by simply adding an on attribute to an HTML element - no Javascript required.

The RIA Widget Framework is a Javascript API for creating new user-interface widgets and for wrapping existing, third-party widgets from widget providers like Yahoo and ExtJS. Appcelerator comes with a set of over 30 pre-built widgets to jumpstart your RIA development efforts. Appcelerator widgets can be added to your application via simple markup - once again, no Javascript is required.

The RIA Message Broker manages all client-side messaging as well as the messaging with Appcelerator services. It’s fully integrated with the Web Expression Language in order to make it easy for developers to message-enable HTML elements.

SOA Development

Appcelerator provides a set of SOA Integration Points that enable service creation in Java, PHP, Ruby, .NET, Python and Perl. SOA Integration Points are fully-integrated with Appcelerator’s message-oriented architecture, which simplifies new service creation. Adding a new service is as simple as creating a method and providing a one-line annotation for the method. Services are automatically discovered by the SOA Integration Point and made available to the user-interface.