Rich Internet Applications (RIA)

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

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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?

“Refactoring Large Software Systems” — an article by Sibylle Peter (Canoo Engineering AG) and Sven Ehrke (Canoo Engineering AG), published in Methods & Tools, Winter Edition 2009.

Refactoring a software system means to refurbish it internally without interfering with its external properties. In his famous book Martin Fowler defines refactoring as follows:

Refactoring is the process of changing a software system in such a way that it does not alter the external behavior of the code yet improves its internal structure. [Fowl, p. xvi]

Fowler describes how to refactor code in a controlled and efficient manner. Although we frequently use these techniques to refactor large software systems, this article is not about refactoring techniques. It rather treats large scale refactoring of systems that suffer from being stuck in an infeasibility stage, which means that it is no longer possible to implement new features and that every bug fix leads to several new bugs.

In this article we describe the different stages of a refactoring project. Before a refactoring project is actually started, an assessment and an in-depth analysis are made which result in a list of findings. Ideally, these findings will be translated into a master plan, which defines WHAT should be refactored. This master plan helps to keep the overall picture of the refactoring project in mind and to divide it into several sub-projects or refactoring parts. Once the master plan is defined we use an iterative approach to tackle the individual refactoring steps.

Before describing this approach we will first have a look at the life path of applications in general, followed by the prerequisites for refactoring projects. WebInvest, our current refactoring project, will be used as example throughout the article. WebInvest is an advisory tool for investment relationship managers. It enables them to simulate trading and to analyze a customer’s portfolio against investment strategies. Read on!

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The life path of a long-living system

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.

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.

Take a look at some photographic impressions of the W-Jax Challenge 2009 (starring Dierk König and Andreas Henle as representatives of the winning team):