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A to Z of Ajax Web Portals:
An Aiubian's endeavour

Md. Anwarul Kabir

On part of a teacher, writing a review of a book authored by his/her favourite student is indeed an immense pleasure. Mr. Omar Al Zabir, a graduate of AIUB and whom I taught some of his undergraduate courses in Computer Science at American International University Bangladesh (AIUB), now is an author of a brilliant book on Ajax-Web-portal technology entitled “Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.Net 3.5”, published recently by a prestigious publisher O' Reilly of USA! This great endeavour of Omar at his young age has truly gratified me in a similar way of a parent's gratification assessing the success of his/her own child.

Title: Building a Web 2.0 Portal with
ASP.NET 3.5
Price $ 29.69
Publisher: O' Reilly Media, the USA
First Edition January, 11, 2008
Pages: 308
ISBN 10: 0-596-51050-0 | ISBN 13:
9780596510503

A Web portal is a webpage that enables the user to create his/her own customised website by dragging and dropping required widget (objects on a computer screen the user interacts with.) onto it. Ajax Web portals are the latest trend of Web development based on modern state of the art technologies. The speciality of the Ajax Web portal technology is that it is highly flexible and extremely client site implementation technology. As in the Ajax technology, the scope for client site programming is very high, using this, the Web developers have the greater opportunity to implement their innovative ideas unlike the previous generations' Web portal where overheads at the server site restrict the flexible use at the client site. Some of the most Ajax Web-portal are iGoogle (www.google.com, MyYahoo() and PageFlakes(www.pageflakes.com).

The book in question concentrates on developing Ajax enabled Web 2.0-style portal. Throughout the book, in explaining critical issues of the Ajax technology, the pageflakes has been used as a case. The use of such a live project as an example has enabled the user to understand better of this new technology. It should be noted here, in the development life cycle of the web portal pageflakes, the author worked as one of the key architects with the capacity of CTO and this, in turn, has transformed him into a master of Ajax technology. I believe the agility and the practical orientation of the book that have been reflected in the book, mainly due to the author's active involvement in the pageflakes project.

The prime objective of the book is to teach the reader Ajax Technology step by step especially using the ASP.net 3.5. The book consists of ten chapters. The first chapter of the book gives an overview of the Web Portal in general and Ajax Web portal in particular. Chapters two and three concentrate on architecture of Web Portal and widgets along with some aspects of the implementations following Ajax technology. For this relevant software tool have been used are C# 3.0, .net 3.5 and ASP.net Chapter four shows the way of building data and business layers using .net 3.5. In this chapter the author has also introduced LINQ (Language Integrated Query) for the readers' convenience. Chapter five has discussed the implementation method of client site widget with practical demonstration. Perhaps, this is one of the critical chapters of the book and by reading this, the relevant developer will be more confident in customizing websites in Ajax Web portal. Chapters six to nine include some advanced features of Ajax web portal technology and also provide various optimizing techniques for the Ajax-enabled websites. These chapters, definitely will help the professionals who want to add some technological complexities to their Ajax websites. The last chapter focuses on deployment of Web farms and solution of common production problems.

To sum up, it can be claimed that this book is a complete reference to Ajax web portal technology written in A to Z format. I hope relevant practitioners, students and amateurs in web development arena will be benefited much following this book.

(The reviewer Md. Anwarul Kabir teaches computer science at American International University-Bangladesh (AIUB), who can be reached at kabir@aiub.edu)