Rich Internet Applications (RIA)

Watch an interesting interview (in German) with Dierk König about the actual language diversity in the Java community — Groovy, Scala, Clojure, JRuby and all the rest of them! If you are interested in this topic, we also recommend to take a look on the schedule of the Java Language Days 2010 (moderated by Dierk König and Markus Völter (itemis).

Excerpt of  ”Rich Internet Applications for Business”, an article by Hans Dirk Walter, CEO Canoo Engineering AG (in print).

Even if RIA technology continues to expand steadily in the future and the number of purely HTML based applications does decline, it is nonetheless not recommended to resort to an RIA framework or library for technology’s sake alone when developing online applications. Instead, the decision depends on the user interface requirements.

Figure 1 provides a schematic illustration of various categories of application depending on usage, and shows the dependency of these applications with regard to interactivity requirements and interface richness (UI functionality, drag & drop, graphics).

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Typical web applications such as online shopping or rail timetables, that are only occasionally visited by their customers, need to be self explanatory and easy to operate. Speed and sophisticated interaction are of secondary importance in these cases. This type of application is best implemented using form based “wizards”. The functionality offered by HTML is generally more than sufficient in such cases. This does not apply, however, to productive systems, whose users often spend several hours per day with the application. The interface need not necessarily be self explanatory, while training is normally worthwhile. These kinds of application should be developed using RIA technology. The final types of program identified are games, which place the most demanding requirements of all in terms of interactivity (extremely speedy program reaction times in response to rapid successive inputs), as well as sophistication (3D animations, film sequences, etc.) Such application have so far scarcely been realised in satisfactory quality as RIAs.

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 ULCLoad 3.0.2 for Mac OS X is now available for download.

This are maintenance release for ULCLoad 3.0. Please see the release notes for a list of implemented feature requests and fixed problem reports.

Please note: the ULCLoad 3.0 license key is valid for all software releases labeled ULCLoad 3.0. If you already have a ULCLoad 3.0 license key, a new license key is not required.

We are pleased to announce that new maintenance releases for UltraLightClient is now available for download.

This is a maintenance release for UltraLightClient ‘08 that fixes the issue
UBA-7852 introduced by update 4.
In addition we have fixed three other issues

• [UBA-7573] – ULCComponent.add/removeNotify() does not work inside ULCTabbedPane and ULCCardPane
• [UBA-7580] – Missing column selection event for ULCTableTree with expansion listener
• [UBA-7760] – [Mac OS X 10.5.7, JRE 1.5] Installing shortcuts on the dock messed up the dock

Please see the ULC ‘08 update 4 release notes for the complete 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 ULC ‘08 license key, a new license key is not required.

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.

We are pleased to announce that new maintenance releases for UltraLightClient and ULCLoad are now available for download.

These are maintenance releases for UltraLightClient ‘08 and ULCLoad 3.0. Please see the ULC ‘08 update 4 release notes and the
ULCLoad 3.0.2 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, the ULCLoad 3.0 license key is valid for all software releases labeled ULCLoad 3.0. If you already have one of these license keys for your product, a new license key is not required.

Session title: Wuala Webstart – Launching a Java Application directly from a Website
Speakers: Luzius Meisser – Caleido AG / Wuala

Luzius describes Wuala (which I’ve never heard of until now) as an all for offline file-storage. The goal was to make this available in as many contexts as possible, and to get the app up and running as fast as possible, which resulted in them creating their own webstart implementation.

In the speaker’s implementation of webstart he demonstrates how the app starts before the complete app is loaded… which if I’m not mistaken is also possible in Java webstart.

The strategy: Load a trusted applet, copy loader.jar into a temp folder and run it. Now RCP exists as it’s own process and consequently survives browser closure…

On the server-side the apparently smart webstart server (the server counterpart to loader.jar) “learns” which classes are needed first and subsequently delivers the app faster and faster with time.

Some extremely wordy slides are shown which are impossible to read because Luzius is talking. To read or to listen? That is the question.

What I’m extracting from this mix of written and spoken words is that their webstart solution enables quicker downloads and updates than conventional Java webstart.

Summary: This short talk was a little confusing to follow until I realised that I was hearing about two technologies: (a) Wuala – the offline file storage solution; (b) The unique webstart implementation – which was developed in order to improve Wuala’s quality. Nevertheless, I found it quite interesting to learn of the existence of Wuala… 20 minutes well spent.

Session title: Programming the Semantic Web with Java
Speaker: Taylor Cowan, Travelocity

Taylor claims to quote Niel Ford (prior keynote): “The best way to predict the future is to create it”… and doesn’t appear aware that he’s actually quoting Abraham Lincoln.

Taylor shows a couple of sites which exhibit the semantic web, one of which is Yahoo.

Then demo’s GeoSPARQl which enables semantic-style queries.

Then contrasts RDFa (a way of embedding RDF in XHTML) with Microformats, the latter being more complex to parse. With RDFa you can use a single format and hence require a single parser. With Microformats you a parser for each format.

Technically, everything identified by UDI, all data as canonical RDF, RDFS provides a schema, OWL provides additional meaning, SPARQL queries semantic web data, RDFa encodes RDF within XHTML.

Speaker then contrasts the RDF Triple Store vs. the Relational DB approaches to persisting semantic web data and notes that RDF is not XML but rather a way of structuring data as a directed graph. In this graph nodes are nouns; axes are verbs.

For the record: Triple = Subject, Verb, Object

The concepts in a semantic declaration can be represented sequentially using N3.

Similarly, the Java API JENA can also be used to model semantic relationships.

Using an inferencing engine new relationships can be derived automatically e.g. the explicitly declared relationship “Java is the primary topic of Jazoon” (after interence) automatically results in a new relationship “Jazoon has Java as the primary topic”. Pretty neat!

One of the major pain points with JENA: Having to create unique URL’s for every entity.

Taylor then describes a bean helper mechanism “JenaBean” (which I understand he created and is hosted at jenabean.googlecode.com) which (he claims) makes working with JENA somewhat easier.

Finally some words on tooling:
Triple stores: JENA, Sesame OpenRDF and Mulgara are all Java-based.
Java binding tools: JenaBean, Jastor, Owl2Java, Elmo.

During Q&A Taylor notes that triple store scalability is often a big issue; thinks that commercial solutions such as Oracle’s will not suffer from this problem.

From the perspective of a non-expert in Semantic web (i.e. myself), this was a valuable, quick introduction to a deep subject. Good stuff!

Links:
http://thesemanticweb.com
http://twitter.com/tcowan