Rich Internet Applications (RIA)

4/29/2010, Technopark Zurich. By Michael Schneider, IBM Rational Research GmbH.

This talk presents a JavaScript execution engine that allows seamless integration of Dojo-flavored JavaScript code in an OSGi based Java runtime. Doing so allows sharing JavaScript code between Web and Eclipse applications, while still providing distinctive user interfaces using HTML and SWT, respectively. As this technology is already deployed in the latest releases of Rational Team Concert, experiences using this approach are shared.

Additionally, a novel approach to develop and evolve large Dojo-based Web 2.0 applications, called JDojo, is introduced. It brings the Eclipse JDT tooling to the JavaScript language to provide typed API, compile time error checking, refactorings and much more, by using the Java syntax. However, in contrast to other approaches, its design is built around the JavaScript language rather than the JDK. It comes with built-in support for interacting with existing JavaScript code. JDojo works perfectly with the JavaScript engine, thus simplifying the development of Web and Eclipse Applications even more.

Read more and register here!

Recently, Dustin Marx postet his top ten of the most “Software Development Developments of 2009“. Here is a short summary as a basis for further discussion:

Changing Landscape of Software Development Conferences: Colorado Software Summit and SDWest and SD Best Practices terminated their long-running tradition in 2009. There is speculation that JavaOne 2009 may have been the last.

Java IDE Wars: IntelliJ IDEA has been the only one of the four leading Java IDEs that has not been available without charge. In 2009, the availability of an open source community edition of IntelliJ IDEA potentially changed the Java IDE landscape.

Groovy: Groovy claims to be “the most popular and successful dynamic language for the JVM”. According to Marx, this certainly seems to be the case (he mentions the high number of books on Groovy (and Grails) and the existence of a DZone area dedicated to Groovy (Groovy Zone) for evidence.

Java EE 6: Marx defines the December release of Java EE 6 as a significant development in the enterprise space.

Oracle buys Sun: According to Marx, even developers who do not use Sun or Oracle products are likely to be at least indirectly affected by this acquisition because it will almost certainly affect the entire software development competitive landscape.

Also included in the ranking were topics as:

• Programming Environments for Mobile Devices
• Bing Search Engine
• Scala
• Java SE 7 News
• Cloud Computing
• Google Chrome OS

If you are interested in Marx’ full review of 2009, please read his blog entry at JW Blogs. He also cited other annual reviews from JavaLobby and Computerworld. So what are last year’s most significant developments in software development from your point of view?

We are pleased to announce that the maintenance release ULC Visual Editor for Eclipse 6.1.2 is now available.

Installation from the update site: http://update.canoo.com/ulcve is easily done using the eclipse built in software installation and updating mechanism

This is a maintenance release for ULC Visual Editor for Eclipse. Please see the release notes for a list of implemented feature requests and fixed problem reports:

Please note: the ULC Visual Editor 6.1 license key is valid for all software releases labeled ULC Visual Editor 6.1. If you already have a ULC Visual Editor 6.1 license key, a new license key is not required.

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