Rich Internet Applications (RIA)

‘Groovy Usage Patterns by Dierk König’ is currently being showcased on the ‘Technology’ page on SlideShare. Enjoy!

CGUG was at the first ever live Grails Podcast event during JavaOne 2009 in San Francisco, CA. This was the first time Sven Haiges and Glen Smith have ever broadcasted from the same location in front of a live audience. Panelists included Canoo Fellow Dierk König, Scott Davis, Andres Almiray, Danno Ferrin and James Williams. 

Scott Davis interviewed Dierk König, Canoo Fellow and Grails/Groovy-Evangelist for Thirsty Head at blip.tv. In the interview, Dierk gives an inside-view about new Grails improvements, about his JavaOne talk, JavaFX and the impact of Canoo Webtest. Enjoy this interesting chat about “beauty and code”!

Over the last two days I attended the PillarOne Conference in Brussels. (PillarOne Conference? Never heard before? That’s probably because this is the first time this conference has taken place.)

The main focus of the conference was not about Web applications or Rich Internet Applications; it was about risk management in the financial sector and how open-source software can assist in averting financial collapse of the kind we’re currently facing.

Over one year ago Munich Re (one of the world’s largest re-insurers) initiated the development of an open-source business application suite entitled PillarOne. PillarOne seeks to address every aspect of reserving and risk analyses of insurance companies. Open-source has particular relevance to this business: Identifying and simulating risk cries out for openness and for a strong community that actively validates the applied models and methods. There is absolutely no doubt that conducting Risk Management behind closed doors and concealing models behind inappropriate tools like Excel has contributed to the current financial crisis.

Intuitive Collaboration’s Markus Stricker points out the direction of future risk management tools

Risk management tools like this also have special requirements which are perfectly met by Rich Internet Application technology like UltraLightClient. Firstly, the complex models and simulations need highly interactive and responsive user interfaces designed for power users. Secondly, truly capable risk management tools must be enterprise solutions with all features these solutions normally have (central database, logging, historization, multi-user synchronization etc.). On the other hand, risk managers are used to having their tools on their laptops being fully functional even if they are off-line. Intuitive Collaboration – the company behind PillarOne – has chosen Grails and UltraLightClient because they meet both these requirements. UltraLightClient is a web-based user interface technology that in conjunction with Grails enables the cost-effective implementation of web applications with the most sophisticated user interfaces that are vital for handling the complex domain of risk management and simulation. Moreover, an application can be deployed as on an enterprise server or as standalone tool on a risk-manager’s laptop without changing a single line of code in the application.

Canoo’s Dierk König and SAP’s Christos Lemonidis demonstrating the SAP integration of ULC and Grails based PillaOne

That PillarOne is a milestone for risk management tools is underlined by the fact that SAP has chosen this platform to offer Solvency II compliant risk management to its insurance customers. Just in time for the conference, the UltraLightClient-based PillarOne was successfully integrated into SAP and shown at the conference as an online demo to a captivated audience.

The conference was attended by a large number of risk managers and regulators, one of whom (a speaker) was bold and self-effacing enough to describe the current crisis as “collective failure of a whole profession”. Whatever the full spectrum of reasons behind this collective failure is, the potential of an open-source tool such as PillarOne is to provide the system with a degree of transparency and robustness that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. This has got to be a good thing for all citizens, not just risk managers!

This is just a quick note about the WJAX Java developer conference that take place last week in Munich.

The conference program was quite balanced and beside the main stream topics about SOA (ServiceOrientedArchitektur – represented by the SOACon conference), Spring, Application Security and OSGi there was a huge number of different topics, which were addressed by several talks.

Most interesting from my point of view were following sessions:

• Keynote from Jonas Jacobi: Re-architecting the Web with HTML 5 Communication.
• Talk from Karsten Lentzsch: Efficient design of swing UI’s.
• Talk from Angelika Langer: Java programming in the age of multicore.
• Talk from Dierk Koenig: RESTful JEE with Grails.

Canoo was exhibiting on a booth, which gave the great opportunity to present and talk about our products UltraLightClient (ULC), the just released language application for the IPhone (using canoo.net), our demo for the new JavaFX platform and fancy UltraLightClient / Swing rich client applications. In addition Canoo members used the presence to keep in touch with existing costumers, contact new ones or presented the company to potential new staff members.

Canoo Online Quiz

All the visitors on the booth and all other interested software developers had and still have the possibility to join an online quiz. Its possible to win an iPod touch or one of ten ‘Groovy in Action’ books. The quiz can be found at www.canoo.com/quiz and will end at the 30.11.2008.

Dierk König, Canoo fellow and author of the ‘Groovy in Action’ book, was holding a groovy workshop and was giving a talk about RESTful JEE with Grails.

Canoo has released a new sample application at ria-map.net. The application shows typical Web 2.0 interface elements such as tagging or Flickr-like editing fields.

I asked the developer, Jonas Zuberbühler, the following questions on the new Canoo sample application.

SW> What is riamap?

riamap is a Web 2.0 community site that maps the world of Rich Internet Applications. Unlike mere information aggregators on the topic, it builds on user contributions to assemble not only a list of current RIA technologies, but also how they relate to each other.

Users can explore what technologies are available, what they have in common, how they differentiate, what competitors they have and how they complement each other. These relations make up a graph that any user can extend by adding new connections or voting how strong any such connection based on his or her own judgment.

SW> What technologies did you use to build it?

We used Grails for the web application framework and Groovy as it is the perfect partner for implementing server-side logic.
In addition, we used Prototype, Scriptaculous and LivePipe to integrate AJAX features and to improve the user interface.

SW> Why did you select Grails? Why not adapt an existing PHP- or Java-based content management system?

Canoo has a strong footing in Java and Grails is the perfect choice for developing Web 2.0 applications on the Java platform. We can build on our solid understanding of this ecosystem and use all the existing tools for development, deployment and operations. On top of this, Grails provides us with the concise, expressive and interactive development style that modern applications require.

Further screenshots:

To get a login for riamap, sign up here to join riamap. Try out the various Web 2.0 interface features. If you feel like adding information on a RIA technology, enter the details here or edit an existing entry.

We’re back from the OpenExpo in Bern. I’ve uploaded some snapshots to our Flickr stream.





Grails Sample Apps:
I’d just like to point you to some sample applications, that Dierk König mentioned in his talk on Grails:

• Canoo’s Planet RIA,
• Canoo’s riamap (launching soon),
• and then there’s showbiz.sky.com which gets over 180 million hits per month.

Upcoming Events:
We’re preparing to exhibit at JavaOne 2008 from May 6 to 9, 2008 in San Francisco. Come and see us there!

Listen to the podcast on Groovy and Grails (in German).

I just updated the Canoo events page and would like to point you to the impressive schedule of events:

Canoo’s CEO, Hans-Dirk Walter is presenting a one-day course on Rich Internet Applications at the ETH in Zurich, in cooperation with Prof. Dr. Donald Kossmann and Prof. Dr. Gustavo Alonso this Friday.

Dierk König will be speaking in Denmark, the USA, Switzerland, Sweden and Germany in the next couple of months on Groovy, Grails and WebTest topics.

Bruno Schäffer is presenting at SD West 08 in Santa Clara, California on “Design Patterns for Rich Internet Applications”.

And we will be exhibiting at this year’s JavaOne in San Francisco from May 6 to May 9.

This has been discussed in several Flex blogs, but I thought I’d add a cross-reference here:

Adobe has open-sourced BlazeDS.

“BlazeDS is Adobe’s server-based Java remoting and messaging technology. Adobe had recently announced that it is contributing the proven BlazeDS technologies to the community; previously it was only available as part of Adobe LiveCycle Data Services ES.”

This is great news for Flex developers because BlazeDS simplifies the client-server split. In addition Adobe published the AMF specification, its binary message format. Have a look at James Ward’s benchmark tool at http://www.jamesward.org/blazebench/.

See also Ryan Stewart’s blog post on the BlazeDS announcement.

And there are plans to develop a Flex plugin for Grails using BlazeDS.