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Overview

Appcelerator Entourage is a suite of open source products that can be use to quickly build browser, desktop and mobile applications. Entourage consists of the following products:

Entrourage MQ

Entourage MQ is a client-side message bus that enables many-to-many message pub-sub. It is seamlessly integrated with our Entourage Service Brokers to provide a powerful message-oriented client/server architecture, but it can also be used to easily consume any REST-based service.

Entourage Expressions

Entourage Expressions (formerly the Web Expression Language) enables developers to build highly dynamic user interfaces without writing Javascript. It also provides native integration with Entourage MQ which enables standard HTML elements publish and subscribe to both local and remote messages. Entourage Expressions integrates the three primary tasks of user interface programming:

Event Handling
DOM Manipulation
Ajax

into one simple expression language - the result is a highly dynamic user interface without writing tons of Javascript

Entourage UI

Entourage UI provides a set of visual controls and behaviors that enable you to quickly assemble the key components of your user interface. Entourage UI also provides a simple Javascript API for creating your own visual components or porting existing widgets into Entourage. Entourage UI is fully integrated with both Entourage MQ and Entourage Expressions. To that point, the initial release of Entourage UI contains widgets from JQuery and YUI (the Yahoo User Interface library). Integrating these great widgets with Entourage UI makes them even more powerful since they are fully integrated with Entourage MQ and Entourage Expressions.

Entourage Service Brokers

Entourage Service Brokers provide the glue between an Entourage user interface and your application services. Entourage services are message-oriented, meaning that they subscribe to messages (typically generated by an Entourage user interface) and publish response messages, which are typically consumed by an Entourage user interface. We provide Service Broker implementations for the following languages:

Java
Ruby
Merb
PHP
C#
Python
Perl

and we provide implementations for the following popular frameworks:

Spring
Zend
Django
Google's AppEngine

The Service Broker API is easy to use, so you can create your own implementation if we don't support your favorite programming language or framework.

Working with Javascript Libraries

Currently, Entourage does require the use of JQuery, but Entourage is built on a Javascript-based abstraction layer that makes it fairly easy to make it work with other popular libraries like Prototype/Scriptaculous, MooTools, Dojo and YUI. We also certainly welcome our community to help provide versions of Entourage for any of these libraries.

Choosing Products to Use

The suite of Entourage products are made to work together, but you don't have to use them all. We provide the following different packages based on your needs:

Overview

Chapters