Atlas Framework

Atlas is really kool stuff. I just downloaded a video from Atlas site and gone thru it once. It does not give much details (as its only a small video for duration of around 15 min). But what all it demonstrates in this small video is just great. All know, AJAX has done tremendous improvements in user experience as far as web applications are concerned. (Gmail is one of the very good examples) Now here comes Atlas framework to make life easy for developers writing AJAX based applications. Using Atlas, you can very easily create different groups (update panels actually in terms of atlas terminology) for your page controls by using simple tags and now when you click on any control in that groups, whole of the page wont post back, rather it just controls belonging to the same update panel would refresh providing user a very rich UI experience.

I remember the day, when I was creating my own calendar control in javascript to save postback at least when user selects any date on my page (cause calendar server control provided by ASP.NET causes a postback for whole of the page for every single click). Now it’s too easy to handle it. Just put your calendar or any other server control in separate update panel so that for any change in calendar it wont post back complete page, rather only the calendar part of it would get redrawn asynchronously. This is really awesome.

A very important thing to look for is grouping of different control on your page. I mean, if any of your control is not in the update panel causing post back, in that case even if you change values for that control from any event, it would not be updated on UI. It would update value for the control internally, but as only controls related to panel causing postback are redrawn so UI would keep on showing old value for that control.