Rich Internet Applications

Another day at Jazoon which of course was dominated by having our talk in the afternoon (see my previous post to get the resources). I guess there were about 50 people attending (it was difficult to see into the audience from the stage). Not too bad compared to the average I saw in other talks.

I still managed to attend some other talks.

JMaki, a framework for designing AJAX applications with a lot of IDE support (Netbeans and Eclipse) is definitely something to keep an eye on. The talk was a good show, but they had too many slides which they just scrolled over to get to the details. The main features of JMaki:

• Support of creating a new ajax web project (in the tradition of Maven, Grails etc.)
• Layout and theme support (done in CSS)
• Integration of several Ajax widgets libraries (Dojo, Scriptaculous, Google etc.). This widgets can be dragged into the web application easily.
• Client Services: A publish/subscribe bus on the client which enables the widgets to talk to each other. This bus is hidden from the developer, but they at least they added some debug support. On top of it they provide an API for the developer to specify the application behaviour.

Check out the JMaki Project for more.

Just before it was our turn, Ed Burns talked about testing AJAX applications. He compared four testing frameworks (Parasoft Webking, OpenQA Selenium, HttpUnit, Mozilla Control Program (MCP)) with regard to following features:
- compatible (running on Windows, Mac and Unix)
- automate-able (integrating in JUnit or TestNG)
- simple API
- capable (support of Ajax)
- detailed

There wasn’t a winner, depending on your need, each framework has some advantages. Ed decided to demonstrate MCP more closely especially how to test AJAX-enriched sites. The demo included some weird hacks (using bitsets for the test result), but then MCP is just not very mature yet.

I asked Ed if he knows Canoo Webtest and of course he did. He told me that it didn’t make it into the talk because of the lack of AJAX support. This is not the whole truth, AJAX is supported partially by Canoo WebTest, meaning as long as it produces valid JavaScript.

Another day at Jazoon and still no time for shopping!

This screencast will show you how to create an UltraLightClient project for the first time, how to run the application in development mode, how to automatically deploy a Web application (in this case as a Servlet, how to deploy it in a Servlet container and how to run it.

The presentation is about 8 minutes long and is for new UltraLightClient developers, that would like to get a quick overview. It uses the ULC Integration plugin for Eclipse, which is available for free from the ULC code community.

See: Eclipse IDE Integration

A personal note: this is my first go at narrating a screencast