Rich Internet Applications

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.

We are pleased to announce that maintenance release UltraLightClient ‘08 Update 1 is now available for download.

This is a maintenance release for UltraLightClient ‘08. Please see the release notes for a list of implemented feature requests and fixed problem reports.

Please note: the UltraLightClient ‘08 license key is valid for all software releases labeled UltraLightClient ‘08. If you already have a UltraLightClient ‘08 license key, a new license key is not required.

The UltraLightClient team is pleased to announce that all Canoo community contributions have been ported to the new UltraLightClient ‘08 release.

Why do I think that this might be of interest to you? Because the community contributions enables you to ultra easy add valuable features to your applications. For example:

Add interactive business charts to your application

The JFreeChart extension contribution provides you with the necessary charting component. Click here to start a sample application that showcases the charting component.

Add maps to your application (e.g. Google Maps)

The JDIC integration contribution provides you with the necessary native browser component. Click here to start a sample application that showcases the native browser component.

Add intelligent text fields to your application (à la Google Suggest)

The Lookup Text Field contribution provides you with the necessary text field component. Click here to start a sample application that showcases the lookup text field component.

Add multimedia to your application (e.g. videos with a Flash video player)

Again, the JDIC integration contribution provides you with the necessary native browser component. Click here to start a sample application that showcases the native browser component.

Link summary
ULC Code Community
List of migrated contributions
Canoo UltraLightClient product page

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

The UltraLightClient team is pleased to announce that the a first bunch of community contributions has been ported to the new UltraLightClient ‘08 release.We are planning to port all relevant contributions to UltraLightClient ‘08 during the next few weeks.

Some words on the UltraLightClient community. The community has two intentions: first of all, it is a component repository for our customers, secondly the UltraLightClient team uses it as a playground to explore new concepts related to UltraLightClient.

Let’s look at these two intentions in some more detail:

UltraLightClient community as component repository for customers
Customers can find ready to use components in the UltraLightClient community that implement a wide range of requirements. Usually these component come from real world projects where Canoo engineers were engaged either as consultants or as developers. I recommend you to have a look at the following gems in the UltraLightClient community:

UltraLightClient community as playground to explore new concepts
The standard approach for new concepts is not to directly integrate them in the release but to explore them first in a separate project that is hosted on the community. This gives you a chance to see what the UltraLightClient team is currently working on. Successful concepts will be integrated in future versions of UltraLightClient. For example, the UltraLightClient ‘08 release integrated the following contributions from the UltraLightClient community:

• Forms: inspired by the Form Model and the Validation Components contribution
• Sortable and filterable tables: inspired by the SortedTableModel and FilteredTableModel contributions
• Easy Sevlet deployment: inspired by the Easy Deployment contribution
• Project generator: inspired by the Eclipse IDE Integration contribution

Link summary
ULC Code Community
List of migrated contributions
Canoo UltraLightClient product page

What contributes to the richness of a RIA (Rich Internet Application)?
What contributes to the poorness of a PUWA (Poor Ugly Web Application)?
How does a RIA compare to a PUWA?

In this post, I’ll discuss forms and what they look like in a RIA. Forms are the sort of things that you find a lot in business applications. For example, bank employees use them to manage customer data, to view account transactions, or to calculate mortgage offers. Or what you, as a brave citizen, use to submit your taxes. But forms are not limited to business applications. You can find them in games to set up your player or to configure the game server.

Consider the following screenshot showing a form to calculate a mortgage offer:

What exactly makes the above form a rich form? Can you spot it? Sorry to disappoint you, but it is not possible to see form richness. The only way to decide that a form is rich or not is to feel the form. And of course with a static screenshot it is really not possible to feel the form. Richness comes from interaction design and not from graphical design. This is a common source for misunderstanding. So let’s repeat it: Richness comes from interaction design and not from graphical design. Two topics in interaction design define the richness of a form: input feedback and input support.

Input Feedback
Let’s start with input feedback. The easier the user can connect the feedback to his or her user interaction, the richer the form. Given this fact, a form within a PUWA can never be rich. A PUWA is page-oriented and the user does not get feedback at the time when he or she enters wrong values. Instead he or she gets feedback only when he or she commits the form (see this groundbreaking article that compares PUWAs with Ajax-based web applications). A measurement for the richness of the feedback is the kind of feedback that is available to the user. Basically we distinguish between syntactical and semantic feedback. Syntactical feedback tells the user that field input is not well formed, e.g. error messages such as this is not a number, this is not an email address, this number has to be between 0 and 18. Whereas semantic feedback puts the input in a broader context and checks for business rules, e.g. the total loan amount may not be greater than 80% of the object’s value, or you are not authorized to withdraw more than 2000€ per week. The more semantic feedback the richer the form.

Input Support
The second measurement for the richness of a form is input support. One well known example for input support is suggesting valid field values as the user types. You can check out this feature at Google Suggest. Other forms of input support are the calculation of dependent values (e.g. calculating the city name for a given zip code) or disabling of non-mandatory fields (e.g. fields defining the legal guardian for underage persons). The more input support, the richer the form.

How does UltraLightClient ‘08 fit into this? First, its server-side architecture is a perfect fit for ultra-easy semantic feedback. This is because all of your code runs always on the server-side. There is no need to split code and propagate business logic to the client. Just access the business objects you need, it is that easy! Second, UltraLightClient ‘08 includes an high-level form component out-of-the-box. This makes the implementation of forms both, efficient and ultra-easy. The application that provided the screenshot above is implemented with UltraLightClient ‘08 and contains all forms of input feedback and input support.

Summary
Richness comes from interaction design (feel) and not from graphical design (see). There are two measurements to decide if a form is rich or not:

• Input feedback: the more semantic feedback the richer the form
• Input support: the more support the richer the form

UltraLightClient ‘08 is a perfect fit for both measurements. Its server-side architecture makes it ultra-easy to provide full semantic input feedback and its high-level form component enables full input support out-of-the-box.

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

Why ULC? (Part 2)

Within UltraLightClient the programming model and the execution model are server side based. ULC applications are installed and run on the web server. On the client side, a small, browser-like presentation engine, that is generic for all applications, links up with the server to display the corresponding user interface component.

Fair enough. But how will your business web application project benefit?

Consider the following reasons:

1) Faster development - re-use instead of re-invent

UltraLightClient was designed for complex web applications in the business world, such as typical data entry applications with tonnes of data, tables, table trees, tabs, forms, charts. The library offers a full range of user interface components to build better web interfaces for enterprise applications.

From a developer’s angle, UltraLightClient takes care of the client/server environment. It handles distribution between the two very efficiently, and as a developer, you do not need to worry about the client/server split. All the application code, presentation and domain logic are run on the server. Development tasks such as distributing the logic between client and server are not required.

Another huge advantage during development time is that you can preview, test and debug without deploying the application. See Chapter 2 of the ULC Essentials Guide for a detailed description of the ULC DevelopmentRunner.

2) Re-use existing HTML application platform

ULC applications share the entire software platform with HTML applications and are easy to integrate with HTML applications. ULC has a typical web application architecture and can be easily used alongside many excellent tools and libraries (e.g. Spring, Hibernate)

3) Better security

In general, ULC applications are easier to protect against security attacks than AJAX-based applications. Java is less vulnerable than JavaScript. ULC applications are secure from cross site scripting (XSS) attacks.

No application code is shipped to or run on the client. The presentation engine is generic and is less susceptible.

4) Profit from Java EE scalabilty options

Standard Java EE is supported. This means that all the scaling options available for Java EE can be used to deploy ULC applications.

5) Highly responsive applications

From the very start UltraLightClient was designed to develop web applications with a desktop-like user interface. The communication has been highly optimized for the web. This ensures fast responses and ensures an increase in user productivity in comparison to the sluggish performance of AJAX applications. ULC applications easily keep pace with the performance requirements of knowledge workers and supports this user requirement out-of-the-box, i.e. you will not need to spend extra time trying to make your web application more responsive.

Link summary:
Why UltraLightClient? (Part 1)
Top reasons to use ULC
Case Studies

At Canoo, we strongly believe in the benefits of a Java-based approach to build richer business web applications. In various service projects, our customers have greatly benefited from this strategy.

We would like to convince more companies to try out UltraLightClient for their web app projects. Within this context, I would like to start a new UltraLightClient blog post series discussing reasons how the Canoo RIA library will benefit your upcoming web project.

Obviously I will be listing the reasons for UltraLightClient. Please feel free to list your comments. In fact, I would like to encourage you to list your doubts and questions. After all, this is a blog. And between you and me, we are a company that likes a good discussion.

One of the first reasons we like to list is:

UltraLightClient is a “Single Technology” approach to building better interfaces for business web applications.

It is a lean Java library that can be easily integrated into your current web app infrastructure. It relies on the Java platform and delegates functions to Java EE and Java SE wherever possible.

What does this mean for your project?

1. Faster and simpler development, because your development team does not need to switch between various programming languages, development tools, or technology concepts.
2. The only language used to build rich user interfaces is Java. UltraLightClient follows standard Swing concepts and its API.
3. It is easier to find developers with the right skill set. Java is a well-established, proven language and you will be able to hire from a wider pool of developers. By selecting Java, you have access to a vast array of open source and commercial libraries and tools (e.g. excellent IDEs).
4. Debugging, testing and maintenance tasks are easier than within an AJAX-based project. Software defects within a single technology space can be tracked much more easily.
5. ULC’s single technology approach is more than skin-deep. With AJAX you might have a nice high-level JavaScript-only API. But as soon as you try to extend an AJAX library, you are exposed to all the ugly details of DOM, XML, CSS, etc.
6. The single technology approach substantially reduces configuration problems when trying to find the right combination of libraries and tools. In a multi-technology environment this is much more time-consuming.

And at the end of the day, these points will save you “real” time and money and reduce the overall risk that your business web application will fail.

Next post in this series: Server-side Architecture

About Canoo and its RIA Technology

Canoo is a solution provider for Rich Internet Applications (RIA) based in Basel, Switzerland. It offers consulting services and end-to-end development of Enterprise Web applications.

Canoo develops and maintains UltraLightClient, a library to create enterprise-class Rich Internet Applications. UltraLightClient bridges the gap between Java Swing user interface components and a Web architecture, providing a cost-efficient, single technology and mature alternative to AJAX.

See also:
“Top reasons to use ULC”
Stefan Ried’s Forrester Report

it management has published an article by Canoo’s CEO, Hans-Dirk Walter on building Rich Internet Applications (RIA) for business applications (in German only).

The article provides a short introduction to RIA and some of the business benefits it offers such as automating global business process, consolidating applications or enabling Software as a Service (SaaS). The article discusses the various evaluation criteria that are relevant when selecting a technology.

• An welche Benutzer richtet sich die Anwendung – soll sie innerhalb eines Unternehmens oder als B2B-Lösung mit Geschäftspartnern eingesetzt werden oder richtet sich die Anwendung an beliebige Benutzer im Internet?
• Wie arbeiten die Benutzer mit der Anwendung? Wird sie gelegentlich aufge-
  rufen oder wird sie von Experten täglich und sehr intensiv zur Erledigung
  von wichtigen Aufgaben verwendet?
• Handelt es sich bei der Anwendung um eine Geschäftsanwendung (z.B. ein CRM- oder ERP-System) oder um eine Anwendung mit Unterhaltungscharakter, in denen Animationen und Multimedia eine grosse Rolle spielen?

A .pdf is available online in the press section of the Canoo website.

Canoo recently published a new look for one of its UltraLightClient sample applications.

Our aim for this sample project was to show that Java web applications need not rely on the standard “grey and clunky” look and feel, but can be customized to fit into a company’s corporate design or to match current web design trends.

The design for the OnlineShop sample was developed by User Interface Design GmbH. Two Canoo developers then implemented the final design within two weeks.

The sample application can be accessed online:

Please note: you will need the Java plug-in to view the sample application.