Introduction to Backbase @ Amis

Yesterday I attended the Backbase introduction at Amis. The fist part of the introduction was focussed at introducing the croud to web 2.0 buzzwords like RIA (= rich internet application), AJAX (asynchronous javascript and xml) en SPI (single page interface). The concepts where demonstrated using the nice demo applications availlable through the backbase website.

The following slide (no. 23 of the presentation) shows the nature of the presentation:

This sort of graphs always remind me of the pirates vs. global warming graph by the FSM people:

A short discussion followed on the topic of: aren’t we abusing web pages for something they shouldn’t be used for? Everybody (including the Backbase people) seemed to agree on the fact that you shouldn’t go over the top (what about those examples??); Stick to site structures as the are and enhance parts of the user experience using AJAX.

After this the new backbase version developed on top of JSF (MyFaces) was ‘interactively’ demoed. Too bad nothing worked… AT ALL.
I did however like the architectural concepts of have delta based (= only the differences are communicated) synchronization of the JSF component tree with the UI component tree, neat trick!

I was a bit dissapointed by answers (or lack of them) to my questions:

• Is it possible to automatically move (duplicate) validation to the client (the demos only used serverside JSF based validation)? Still waiting for the e-mail to tell me if it is possible…
• How are validation/conversion exceptions handled? Still waiting for the e-mail….
• What about performance? In previous projects I wasn’t to impressed by the performance of MyFaces…. speaker didn’t know.
• Is is possible to have partial encryption in the delta xml for security purposes without going to full SSL? Speaker didn’t seem to understand my question…

Next to all this I was a bit put down by the licensing schema: Backbase charges for the number of CPUs in all webservers that use the Backbase software (live, staging, development, etc.). So you have to pay licenses for ALL the CPUs ($5000 per CPU) in your OTAP environment… what the hack??

But, look at the bright side… I learned some new buzzwords!

update:

I actually recieved an e-mail answering two of my questions:

• Client side validation (given reason: client is not java aware >> what about AJAX callbacks?) is not supported out-of-the-box…
  
• JSF state saving is only supported in ‘server’ modus, switching the underlying myfaces application to clientside statesaving breaks the framework. (Almost forgot I asked this question).