Rich Internet Applications

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:

| View | Upload your own

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.

Here is the video we recorded on Monday with Ryan Stewart, technical evangelist at Adobe:

In the background you can see snow piling up on the window sill.

Regarding videos we are just starting out and the usual disclaimers regarding quality apply. We had some background noise, especially when the staff ordered the next day’s supplies. Any feedback you have is greatly appreciated.

As documented in my previous post, we decided to take Ryan Stewart to see the Swiss mountains. And despite a small detour based on some wrong information I got in Zurich, we made it to the top of Pilatus, near Lucerne.

Unfortunately we didn’t have much of a view, but lots of snow. And lots of time to chat and discuss RIA topics such as:

• Building prototypes to show the benefit of better GUIs,
• Silverlight, WPF, AIR, Flex, and Java FX,
• Cool RIA demos,
• The link between mountaineering and RIA,
• The OnAir bus tour and plans for a European train-based version.

After a cheese fondue in one of the warm and cozy Pilatus restaurants, Dierk König asked Ryan some RIA questions. We taped the interview and I’ll try and upload the (amateur) video as soon as possible.

JUGS event on RIA with Björn Müller and Ryan Stewart

If you’re in the Zurich area this week, I’d like to encourage you to attend the JUG Switzerland event on Wednesday, November 14th at the Technopark in Zurich.

Big thank you to Kyra and Ryan for coming along!

I just heard via Dierk that Daniel Adelhardt of Sun Germany mentioned Canoo’s Java FX sample app Music Pinboard in one of his sessions.

Cool!

JUG Switzerland event on RIA and AJAX

As mentioned in this post, Java User Group Switzerland (JUGS) is organizing an event on Rich Internet Applications and AJAX on November 14th, 2007 at the Technopark in Zürich, Switzerland.

Sign up for this event at the JUGS site. The event is free for first time attendees and JUGS members.

I am really excited that this event is taking place and that Björn Müller and Ryan Stewart are coming. The talks will cover various RIA technologies and help show how these technologies improve business applications. We hope to start a fruitful discussion, which will benefit all attendees and provide a summary of current developments in the RIA space.

BTW, we are taking the RIA Mountaineer to Pilatus for a RIA summit

Ryan Stewart calls himself the RIA Mountaineer. And being in Switzerland, we thought that he must see the mountains while he is here.

We would like to invite RIA enthusiasts to come with us on our excursion to Pilatus on Monday morning, November 12th (further details) and discuss RIA developments. Please contact me if you are interested in coming along.

Further links:

JUGS event on Rich Internet Applications and AJAX
RIA Event in Zurich on 14th November 2007
Pilatus excursion details on Upcoming

Andres Almiray held a session on “Drawing graphics the Groovy way” at the recent Silicon Valley Code Camp:

RIAs are taking on the scene with renewed force, you will find many players in this area, Groovy being one of them. For quite a while Groovy provided a simple yet powerful way to create Swing UIs, what was missing was the ability to create graphics in a similar way. GraphicsBuilder is to Java2D what SwingBuilder is to Swing, together they provide a foundation for doing RIA development with Groovy.