Manage 2000 Web 2.0

No, I don't know what it means either. But I do think the web user experience on Manage 2000 7.3 is going to be noticeably and, in many cases, dramatically improved from the 7.1/7.2 technology. It seems to me like the we are passing through the 3rd generation up the web UI S-curve. With release 7.0 we dabbled with asp script based web infrastructure. We've had a good run with Visual Studio 2003 and ASP.NET 1.1 as a basis for Manage 2000 7.1/7.2 releases. And now with release 7.3 we are working on top of ASP.NET 3.5 using VS 2008 with more current infragistics controls and a much more robust client side javascript infrastructure library roiGlobal.js with deeper support from the Prototype.js, which underlies many other clientside toolsets such as Ruby-On-Rails and Scriptoculus.

Every project brings with it opportunities to enrich the roiGlobal.js library and move more time sensitive user interactions to the client-side world of javascript, D-HTML, JSON, and AJAX. Yet even as I explore these new environments and tools I find myself re-creating patterns from the PWS / SUB.MT500 world. There are few things as elegant and powerful as the declaritive UI specificaton for a computer prompting a user which is called the PID in M2k geekspeak.

Following that pattern Manage 2000 7.3 web pages all have the equivalent of PID available. It is defined in roiGlobal.js based on a Prototype.js class called a Hash. It's name in nvcMetaData, and it is to the web function what PID(40) is to the PWS function. That is to say that dynamically altering the metadata item for an HTML textbox effectively controls its behavior. Thus, application behavior can be achieved by setting properties of the metadata instead of having to code up all the necessary javascript.