A common functionality that web developers need to implement on modern AJAX-enabled web sites is to display tabular data from a database or from other backend data source. Because it would be too costly to download the entire table at once, assuming a reasonably large dataset, the table needs to be able to fetch sections of the dataset behind the scenes as the user scrolls through the list. Ideally, the user can re-sort the table by column, typically by clicking on the column header.

Nitobi (formerly eBusiness Applications) just released version 3 of the company's EBA Grid AJAX toolkit, which provides a framework for implementing just these kinds of tables. It runs on ASP, .NET, PHP or JSP platforms (with JSF and Coldfusion coming soon, according to the Nitobi web site). The solution consists of two pieces. One is the Javascript and CSS style sheets to implement the browser side of the AJAX contract, and the other is libraries appropriate to the deployment platform, which services the browser Javascript requests. I examined the JSP-based solution using Tomcat on a Windows XP platform.

The trial version of the software comes as a ZIP file, which contains the libraries and support files for the server, the CSS and image files needed for the browser, and a War file with a sample application. Between the provided help files and sample code, it's fairly easy to get things set up. However, there are serious holes in the documentation and even outright errors. In some places, it looks like the 2.0 documentation hasn't been updated, and some sections are totally blank. Even where documentation is provided, it can be scant on details at times.

The best way to talk about what's involved in using this product is to show you an example. I used the EBA Grid AJAX toolkit to view some MythTV program data stored on a nearby server.