Rich Internet Applications

In this blog post series, I am revisiting some of the arguments in favor of a Java-based RIA library such as UltraLightClient. Please leave a comment and share your views. See Part 1 and Part 2.

Why ULC (Part 3)

I’ll spare you the typical marketing speak about how we believe Canoo’s UltraLightClient will save you real money in terms of time for development and maintenance. Instead I’ll quote from an email that we received from one of our North American customers.

This development team decided to replace JSF by UltraLightClient halfway through the project. Despite this major change, the project deadline was not extended. Nevertheless, the team managed to deliver in time. Here’s what the Project Lead for Web and User Interface Development had to say on UltraLightClient:

1. JUnit testing With JSF, unit testing of the interface required much contortion and difficulty in order to make sure the html interface was rendering the correct html. With ULC and Jemmy, the process is as easy as naming the widget and testing its behavior or content. This made for not only easier testing, but far more and far better test cases as the developers had more times and better ease of implementation.
2. Extremely easy communication with the model. Eliminating the deployment descriptors of JSF, we could interact with the model by actually accessing attributes and calling methods directly on the actual objects. This eliminated the continual transformation between objects and beans, etc that JSF requires. I realize a lot of this can be facilitated with tools, but it seemed even better just to eliminate this needless transformation. Also, the performance was far better with this direct access to the model.
3. Deploying locally. This is the holy grail of ULC. The fact that I can hit in Eclipse and see exactly what I am working with, or even better, put a break point in the test case and play with the specific part of the interface from there without having to deploy the application! WOW! This reduces developer time by hours per day.
4. Rich functionality of ULC widgets. This may seem like just a perk to the interface but it is a development issue as well. The fact that the widgets are so feature rich allows the developer to spend less time trying to simulate rich features in DHTML or JavaScript and more time actually realizing the requirements of the application.

I believe these 4 points are the most important benefits we realized in developing in ULC. (…) We built a full fledged loan renewal system interface in 5 months (4-6 developers). This would have been impossible without the development ease of ULC.

Other corporate customers say similar things

Please feel free to contact the ULC sales team and ask for further references.

Further links:
Pricing
Case Studies

Soreco Group, one of Switzerland’s leading software houses, uses Canoo’s Rich Internet Application library to develop and distribute its flagship product Xpert.Ivy

Xpert.Ivy is a business process management platform for mid-sized and large corporations.

Inside-IT recently wrote:

Xpert.ivy 4.0 enthält nun GUI-Komponenten-Bibliotheken, mit denen man Anwenderoberflächen “zusammenklicken” kann. Die gesamte Logik der Oberflächen wird dabei serverseitig abgewickelt. Auf dem Client braucht es lediglich eine übliche Java Runtime Umgebung, um den RIA-Client (RIA - Rich Internet Application) laufen zu lassen.

Soreco verwendet für Xpert.ivy als OEM die “UltraLightClient”-Technologie des Basler RIA-Spezialisten Canoo. Die Schwerzenbacher bezeichnen die Möglichkeit, mit der BPM-Plattform nicht nur Prozesse und Webservices zu modellieren, sondern mit Version 4.0 gleich auch noch gut aussehende und funktionale RIA-Benützeroberflächen zu bauen, einen “Quantensprung.”

See also this recent press release by Soreco (in German).

Soreco is building their next generation platform using Canoo UltraLightClient. This is an awesome reference for Canoo. Being selected by an independent software vendor like Soreco underlines the stability and maturity of UltraLightClient.