Natural Language Gets AJAX Support
Software AG recently unveiled Natural for AJAX, a variant of Software AG's Natural 2006 programming language. Natural 2006 is typically used at the enterprise level for transactional systems running on mainframes.
Natural for AJAX helps developers create AJAX-based rich Internet applications and user interfaces and promises faster Web application development.
Development is aided by drag-and-drop creation of complex applications and user interfaces without having to hand-code the project. Resulting applications can achieve the look and feel of Web 2.0 applications through the use of a library of more than 50 Web graphical user interface controls, according to an announcement issued by the company.
Other features include ready-made context menus, modeling and code generation, and support for service-oriented architectures. Natural for AJAX also is compatible with the open source Eclipse Java development environment and .NET development tools.
"What Natural for AJAX offers is a comparatively simple means for allowing users to fully engage with an extremely powerful transactional processing environment," stated Joe Gentry, senior vice president and chief technology officer for the Enterprise Transaction System business division of Software AG, in a press release.
AJAX is a technology designed to improve user experiences with Web applications by constantly retrieving data from the server without having to reload the entire document. Like server-side applications, AJAX does not require any plug-ins, runtime environments, or any software on the client side other than a normal browser to work.