When Firmenlauf ‘10 was announced, Canoo decided to build a team and to participate again this year. We had great fun last time (see Firmenlauf ‘09 part I and II) and the race deadline gave us a goal for our rigorous 30° lunchtime jogging sessions. Also I personally like the team spirit generated by such events.

Left to right: Andrei, Christian, Roland, Johannes, Hamlet, Günter, Markus and Alexandra

Even though six kilometers is a relatively small distance, a certain fitness is still needed to increase the pleasure factor. Otherwise you are only suffering and this is definitely not what you want to achieve.

It was interesting to observe how the team organized itself for the training sessions. The participants regularly asked each others to go for group runs. The single shower we have here at the office rapidly became a bottleneck, adding some roughness to the whole story.

We regrettably had to experience two defects. Hamlet kindly accepted the challenge in the last minute. So at the end we were 8 at the starting line instead of 9 initially announced. At 7pm on Friday the 9th of July the starting gun fired. After a cumulated time of 2:10:34,5 the first group of Canooies composed of Alexandra, Markus, Günter and Christian crossed the line hand in hand, just after the Herzog & de Meuron architects but before another Software engineers company I am not mentioning by name… For a complete results overview, click here.

Left to right: Markus, Christian, Günther and Alexandra

The rest of the team composed of Roland, Andrei, Johannes and Hamlet successfully crossed the line as well. Everyone did an incredible job. I can tell you: this year was really hard. It was so hot and humid. A couple of people collapsed (no one from Canoo luckily) and we heard the ambulance at least once.

More photos could be found on Flickr.

The future belongs to Rich Internet Applications (RIA) – they are increasingly replacing the classical desktop application. And it is no wonder, as this latest generation of web applications offers a totally new kind of interactivity. Furthermore, RIAs spare your budget thanks to their operating system independence and the fact that they can be used without installation. According to the market research organization Forrester Research, RIA technology will be deployed in around 60% of all software development projects in the coming years.

The disadvantage of most of today’s RIA frameworks is that they were developed for the optimization of web sites. They rapidly reach their limits, therefore, with complex business applications. Canoo Engineering’s Canoo RIA Suite with its modular design provides a remedy. It’s heart is ULC (UltraLightClient), a proven and stable component for the development of RIAs – optimized for the performance requirements of business applications. Thanks to the 100% java-based homogeneous programming model, ULC reduces the complexity of RIA projects to a minimum. RIAs developed with ULC score highly due to their low development and maintenance costs, and are more than a match for classical desktop applications in user-friendliness, functionality, attractiveness, robustness and performance.

Since March 31, 2010, ULC Core is available as a Beta Release. The Canoo Ria Suite will be released officially just before Pentecost 2010. The advantages at a Glance:

• Up to 50% reductions in development costs
• Puts business functionality on to the web without quality losses
• Lower operational costs thanks to server side maintenance and standardized technology
• Maximum security thanks to standard conformity
• Straightforward and rapid development due to uniform Java basis
• Robust and scalable architecture
• No longer time-consuming client-side deployment
• Enables highly interactive and user friendly interfaces
• No browser adaptation required
• Optimal user productivity due to rapid response times
• Lower project risk thanks to well engineered, tried and tested technology
• Impressive prototypes in minimal time

“We switched to ULC in the middle of a large software project, as we were not able to implement all the requirements with the technology we were using at the time. ULC then enabled us to at least double our productivity, in turn allowing the project to be completed on time.”

Greg Hutchinson, Principal Developer of a large Canadian financial institution

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!

Canoo Engineering is proud to present the next generation of UltraLightClient! Download the Beta here!

The RIA-Framework (Rich Internet Application) has been completely overhauled and enhanced with a series of innovative and useful functions. These will enable more efficient and convenient deployment in future, as well as adding some attractive features to the design of the user interface.

UltraLightClient will bear the name ULC Core from now on, and forms the basis of the new Canoo RIA Suite, which will officially be released at the beginning of May. The suite is designed in a modular fashion, allowing you to compose functionality according to your own needs. And you only pay for those modules which you actually require.

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The Highlights

• The new Chart Functionality enables you to present even complex facts and figures clearly and simply.
• Using the integrated Animations Framework you can develop dynamic and attractive content in future.
• Further sophisticated graphic features allow even more attractive designs: transparency, rounded angles etc.
• Easy integration to Google App Engine.

THE NEW MODULES AT A GLANCE

ULC Table Plus: this package enables you to implement even the most complex tabular requirements in a rapid and straightforward manner.

ULC Web Integration: simply integrate any browsers such as Safari, Firefox or Internet Explorer into your application developed under ULC. Web services and plug-ins like Google Maps or Flash Player can thus be launched directly in the application.

ULC Office Integration: this ULC Core module supports the future import and export of Excel and Word files out-of-the-box. The contents can then be stored as PDF files and later printed.

ULC Enterprise Portal Integration: using this optional extra, existing portlet applications can be easily and efficiently augmented with ULC applications.

ULC Visual Editor: with the optimized visual editor you can generate your ULC applications by drag & drop even more easily and, as usual, without any manual programming effort whatsoever.

ULC Load: put your ULC applications though extensive load and performance tests using ULC Load. Thus you can be confident that your applications can bear up to the most rigorous demands in an operational environment.

Download the Beta here!

JAXenter interviewed Canoo Fellow Dierk König on Groovy++. Read the Interview in German or join the Groovy++ Group dedicated to discussions of experimental statically typed compiler for Groovy programming language!

Update: As from now, the interview is also available in English! By the way: What is “Groovy++”?

Dierk König: Groovy + + is an extension of Groovy, which makes Groovy code pretty much as fast as native Java. In addition, you get static type checking plus type inference, yielding the benefits of compile-time safety but without the noise. To use the language extension, you only need one additional jar file in the classpath. Then you can annotate the required code parts – classes for example – with @Typed. The rest happens automatically. This approach takes advantage of Groovy’s ability to hook into the compilation step with AST Transformations. The name “Groovy + +” indicates that it is still Groovy, and therefore encompasses the entire beauty of the language syntax while exceeding the standard characteristics. Read on!

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).

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The well known research firm Gartner just published it’s Top Predictions for IT Organizations ans Users for 2010 and beyond, covering developments which definitely affect the RIA market, too. Their key findings are:

• IT Ownership: ”By 2012, 20% of businesses will own no IT assets”.
• Cloud Computing: “By 2012, India-centric IT services companies will represent 20% of the leading cloud aggregators”.
• Social Networking: “By 2012, Facebook will become the hub for social network integration and Web socialization”.
• Sustainability: ”By 2014, most IT business cases will include carbon remediation costs”.
• Internet Marketing “will be regulated by 2015, controlling more than $250 billion in Internet marketing spending worldwide”.
• Mobile Commerce: “By 2014, over 3 billion of the world’s adult population will be able to transact electronically”.
• Context Aware Computing “will be as influential to mobile consumer services [..] as search engines are to the Web”.
• User Devices: “By 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide”.

Perhaps the most aggressive outlook is the prediction that mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access devices worldwide by 2013 — Morgan Stanley wasn’t quite that courageous. If we look closely, Gartner predicts that mobile phones will drive the higher number of website accesses “due to the sheer weight of device numbers”, but the “the bulk of page views will continue to occur through larger-format devices”. However: The RIA sector has to get ready for the mobile revolution, existing websites and web-based applications should be designed to be device-independent and their information structure has to be redesigned for mobile phone access.

CanooNet Mobile V2 (announced for 2/2010) demonstrates a successful redesign of a content structure for mobile access: No information should be positioned more than 3 clicks away from the user.

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?

While preparing the second edition of “Groovy in Action”, Canoo Fellow Dierk König once again worked systematically through the language and came across a number of new features that slipped by his attention when they were added. His talk (from Groovy & Grails eXchange 2009, London) presents those features in a workshop-like manner with demos, live coding and lots of interaction with the audience. Watch the video on Skills Matter!

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Dierk with James Gosling during Jazoon 2009

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.