Beginning Atlas series: Why Atlas?

This is the first question everyone asks me when they see
Pageflakes. Why not
Protopage or Dojo library? Microsoft Atlas is a very promising AJAX
library. They are putting a lot of effort on Atlas, making lots of
reusable components that can really save you a lot of time and give
your web application a complete face lift at reasonably low effort
on changes. It integrated with ASP.NET v very well and it is
compatible with ASP.NET Membership and Profile provider.

When we first started developing Pageflakes, Atlas was in
infant stage. We were only able to use the Page Method and
Webservice Method call feature of Atlas. We had to make our own
drag & drop, component architecture, popups, collapse/expand
features etc. But now you can have all these from Atlas and thus
save a lot of development time. The web service proxy feature of
Atlas is a marvel. You can point a < script> tag to a .asmx
file and you get a javascript class generated right out of the web
service definition. The Javascript class contains the exact methods
that you have on the web service class. This makes it really easy
to add/remove new webservices, add/remove methods in webservices
which does not require any changes on the client side. It also
offers a lot of control over the AJAX calls and provides rich
exception trapping feature on the javascript. Server side
exceptions are nicely thrown to client side javascript code and you
can trap it and show nicely formatted error messages to the user.
Atlas works really well with ASP.NET 2.0 eliminating the
integration problem completely. You need not worry about
authentication and authorization on page methods and web service
methods. So, you save a lot of code on the client side (of course
Atlas Runtime is huge for this reason) and you can concentrate more
on your own code then building up all these framework related
codes.

Recent version of Atlas works nicely with ASP.NET Membership and
Profile services giving you login/logout features from Javascript
without requiring page postbacks and you can read/write Profile
object directly from Javascript. This comes very handy when you
heavily use ASP.NET membership and profile providers in your web
application which we do at Pageflakes.

On earlier versions of Atlas, there was no way to make HTTP GET
calls. All calls were HTTP POST and thus quite expensive calls. Now
you can say which calls should be HTTP GET. Once you have HTTP GET,
you can utilize Http response caching features which I will explain
soon.

I will be writing about lots of Atlas tips and tricks. I am
assuming you are familiar with Atlas and you have already tried
some quick start tutorials and you know the concepts of Page
Method, Web service Proxy, Script Manager etc.