Rich Internet Applications (RIA)

Canoo’s Dierk König is speaking at today’s Developer Day at the Hochschule der Medien in Stuttgart / Germany on “Groovy: An agile dynamic language for the Java Platform“.

There is a live video stream currently showing at mms://stream.mi.hdm-stuttgart.de/developerday07.

Dierk’s presentation is scheduled for 15:45.

A couple of weeks ago, we added a new case study to the UltraLightClient website:

Content Management System for Tourism Portal

Tinext, a Swiss software company, developed a portal for touristic information. The portal is currently used by different content providers, among them www.ticino.ch, www.lakesandalps.com, www.scta.ch, www.maggiore.ch, and www.ristoranti.ch.

While the frontend is an HTML web application, the content management system (CMS) that runs the site was built using Canoo’s UltraLightClient.

The CMS is used by local tourist offices in Ticino and some provinces in northern Italy to add new information on cultural events and special offers. Managers and owners use the CMS to add and edit their specific content for hotels, restaurants, houses for rent, camping sites, and hostels.

See also:
UltraLightClient
Case Studies

A couple of weeks ago, Marc Guillemot published a blog post comparing Canoo’s WebTest and Selenium.

He has also published links to two WebTest screencasts, which I would like to highlight today.

My first WebTest project

The first screencast shows how to set up a WebTest project:

Data Driven WebTest

The second screencast shows how to setup a data driven WebTest using Google Calculator as an example:

Further links on WebTest:
Website
Installing WebTest

Here are the slides of the recent W-JAX workshop “Von Java zu Groovy” by Dierk König, Johannes Link, and Tammo Freese. The slides are in German:

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Together with about 80 other persons (estimated by a JUGS member) I attended the JUGS RIA event. Bruno started with a short (15′) introduction into RIA for Business. He started with an excursion to the past and showed how the trend moved from terminal to desktop application, then to web applications and now finally to desktop-like Rich Internet Applications. For enterprise applications he listed three major opportunities:

• Highly productive Tools with powerful user interfaces
• Portal environment
• Mobile devices

While generally stressing the importance of interaction design, Bruno clearly explained that rich applications for mobile are not shrinked RIA applications but need to be tailored for the device. (A dedicated IPhone user speaking ).

Then Björn Müller was giving us a reality check for AJAX. In my opinion this was the most surprising talk. Björn presented some hard facts about AJAX which in his (and mine) opinion clearly limit the use of AJAX. Some of the facts to consider when planning an AJAX application:

• Performance. JavaScript is 20 to 50 times slower than Java. Period.
• Frameworks. There are a lot (too many) frameworks around which need evaluating. And each come with KBs of JavaScript code
• Cross Browser Issues. Most of them can be solved but at a severe cost.

The message I take home from this experienced AJAX developer is that he considers it a risk to develop rich applications for power user with AJAX. (Which was my gut feeling for quite some time, but now I have some facts. The slides will be published on the JUGS site for you to judge for yourself). But that AJAX is a very appropriate technology for application with casual users as the target audience.

Finally Ryan Stewart, the Adobe RIA evangelist was speaking. It was very disappointing that he couldn’t show us most of the demos due to the lack of internet connection. In his talk he presented several RIA technologies, well known like JavaFX, Silverlight and Flex and others like Curl etc. One reaction he got from the audience was that they are more confused concerning RIA technologies than before the event. Interesting was that also Ryan sees a big potential in rich application for mobile devices.

All in all a very interesting event, I only hope that other attendees felt the same. Feel free to comment and post your opinion.