Rich Internet Applications (RIA)

Today, Thursday June 18th, we have been invited by CIS Computer Information Systems to give an update about the new ULC features to an audience of 75 people in Bratislava. The venue took place in the busines park of Kerametal.

CIS is a very successful partner of Canoo, based in the capital city of Slovakia. CIS has 7 employees and exists since 18 years. They are specialized in IBM Rational, Oracle WebLogic, UltraLightClient and other RIA technologies.

Twice a year, CIS is inviting customers to a one day conference. In spring more product, in fall more hands on focused. Even if this time the products where in focus, it was an all technical oriented event. The presenters mostly where sitting in front of their PC’s, talking and programming in parallel. It looked like this was the style the audience was used to and so Marcel Rüedi gave his UltraLightClient pitch in the same way. Marcel was presenting all new features and functions within 45 Minutes in perfect Swiss English All other presentations have been presented in Slovakian language and guess what, it is not really similar to German, so we didn’t understand anything.

During the brakes we where talking with the CIS developers, mainly Anton Levcik and Pavol Diveky. Anton is the ULC specialist at CIS. In this role he is supporting customers in developing ULC based applications and interfaces. Several times a year he’s giving ULC trainings in Slovak language. So if you’d ever need a ULC training in Slovak….

Anton and Dalibor have introduced us to several ULC customers:

• Smart Management: SW developer, which has replaced an AS400 based solution for a Slovak hotel group.
• SZP: Slovak health insurance company for public services (police, army, etc.), semi government working with an ULC based application to internally handle customer information
• Ness a.s.: worldwide group, SW developer with 13 ULC Licenses.
• Siemens: developing applications for T-Systems and government.

CIS and all customers, where extremely pleased with ULC and that they had a chance to talk with Canoo directly.

Next Steps:

• CIS is trying to arrange for us a view into some of the customers application
• CIS will invite us to the conference in November. They are very interested in ULC / Groovy & Grails integration, ULC / FX and ULC Mobile.

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!

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.

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