Rich Internet Applications (RIA)

The Apple iPhone, just like its bigger brother (the iPad), does not exactly shine with its universality: In the end, the technical options and the contents that may be used are determined by the parent company.

However, it is precisely this limitation in the user and developer flexibility, in addition to the purist and inherently coherent design of the user interface that are the secret of its universal success. The user experiences a successful reduction in complexity from app to app within a homogenous user interface environment, in which he quickly finds his way around. The problem of information transport, according to media expert Neil Postman, has long been solved. Now it is about developing the right selection techniques in order to come to terms with this flood of information.

Successful complexity reduction

Precisely this demand is fulfilled by the in-house engineers at Apple, as well as the developers of successful programs that run on the iPhone. Now however, these inventers often are not exactly world-beaters when it comes to experience in UI design or architecture development. Rather they place themselves intuitively in the shoes of the users and ask themselves what information they would like to call up on their iPhone themselves. And Apple supports this implementation via an SDK that delivers many graphic effects and interface components out of the box. This intentional simplification of options creates a world which eases the navigation through this flood of information to such a degree that most users happily put up with any such limitations.

Levelling the fastest routes

What can we learn now from the iPhone phenomenon for the development of Rich Internet Applications? In production systems it is less crucial to push the limits of technical feasibility or to place emphasis on the maximum user flexibility. What counts instead is to smooth the most rapid route to the required information and functions for the users, without them having the need to deal with the intricacies of program structure. To fulfil these needs the developers need to put themselves in the users’ shoes, which is easier in the case of greatly restricted iPhone apps than with complicated web applications that quite often cover the scope of entire departments.

In view of these over-complications it seems tempting in the initial phase of a project not to pose too many questions to the end users (or indeed one’s own intuition), but rather to proceed in the hope that people will get used to the technically more familiar structures. These are, however, shortcuts that can come with acrimonious paybacks at a later date.

Tools that help those in charge to see things from the users’ point of view (e.g. paper prototyping) may initially appear laborious and, due to the lack of “hard” results, unnecessary. But rather than definitive guide-rails, this phase is more concerned with developing a feeling how the users’ workflows could be integrated into the future application, and to identify which paths in the current IT environment are often or only seldom trodden, so as to provide orientation for the subsequent development process.

The goal is therefore to pick out the basic limitations and requirements for simplification right at the start of a project, so as to attain similar complexity reductions in the context of productive systems such as some successful iPhone apps demonstrate.

Title of this session: Development for the iPhone from a Java Perspective
From: Software Architect Ognen Ivanski, Netcetera

Note: Netcetera developed the wemlin app for the iPhone – a useful tool for navigating public transport in the Zürich area.

Ah… it’s become apparent to me that Ognen will tell us about his personal experience with becoming an iPhone developer, having previously been a Java developer. I have gone through this process myself and so it will be interesting to compare notes…

Ognen states that the first realisation was that performance, startup-time and UI were kind of new priorities for him. Not really the case for me, I must say. Canoo is known for its RIA experience and therefore these are issues we’ve been dealing with for some time. For the record: The issues which I found most difficult when switching to the iPhone SDK and XCode were:

- No garbage collection: Clearly I’ve been spoiled by Java
- XCode: Powerful but nowhere near as comfortable as a typical JavaIDE
- SCM support: We managed to get Subversion working, but kept running into trouble with things getting out of sync anyway. Best to use the command line

I certainly agree with Ognen’s observations on XCode: Like me, he missed features such as refactoring and the countless options for viewing, navigating and outlining code.

Ognen notes that XCode’s visual builder is difficult to get used to but delivers in the end. Possibly like many Java/would-be iPhone developers, I shied away from the visual designer, opting to code from hand instead. Perhaps for my next iPhone app I’ll take a look at it again.

I agree with Ognen’s observations on Objective C syntax. It’s got a “familiar and yet somewhat strange” feel to it. The behaviour around “nil” seems odd at first, but one quickly learns to appreciate that it pays not to have to check for null values all the time, as in Java code.

There follows a lot of examples of Objective C Syntax.

Patterns of note in the iPhone world: Delegate pattern, Target/Action pattern, MVC – which is perhaps truer to the original Smalltalk concept that what we typically see in Java swing, say.

In summary: A good presentation, but no new insights for someone who’s gone through the process of switching from Java to iPhone development already.

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.