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

In this blog post series, I am revisiting some of the arguments for a Java-based RIA library such as UltraLightClient. Please leave a comment and share your views. Read Part 1 here.

Why ULC? (Part 2)

Within UltraLightClient the programming model and the execution model are server side based. ULC applications are installed and run on the web server. On the client side, a small, browser-like presentation engine, that is generic for all applications, links up with the server to display the corresponding user interface component.

Fair enough. But how will your business web application project benefit?

Consider the following reasons:

1) Faster development – re-use instead of re-invent

UltraLightClient was designed for complex web applications in the business world, such as typical data entry applications with tonnes of data, tables, table trees, tabs, forms, charts. The library offers a full range of user interface components to build better web interfaces for enterprise applications.

From a developer’s angle, UltraLightClient takes care of the client/server environment. It handles distribution between the two very efficiently, and as a developer, you do not need to worry about the client/server split. All the application code, presentation and domain logic are run on the server. Development tasks such as distributing the logic between client and server are not required.

Another huge advantage during development time is that you can preview, test and debug without deploying the application. See Chapter 2 of the ULC Essentials Guide for a detailed description of the ULC DevelopmentRunner.

2) Re-use existing HTML application platform

ULC applications share the entire software platform with HTML applications and are easy to integrate with HTML applications. ULC has a typical web application architecture and can be easily used alongside many excellent tools and libraries (e.g. Spring, Hibernate)

3) Better security

In general, ULC applications are easier to protect against security attacks than AJAX-based applications. Java is less vulnerable than JavaScript. ULC applications are secure from cross site scripting (XSS) attacks.

No application code is shipped to or run on the client. The presentation engine is generic and is less susceptible.

4) Profit from Java EE scalabilty options

Standard Java EE is supported. This means that all the scaling options available for Java EE can be used to deploy ULC applications.

5) Highly responsive applications

From the very start UltraLightClient was designed to develop web applications with a desktop-like user interface. The communication has been highly optimized for the web. This ensures fast responses and ensures an increase in user productivity in comparison to the sluggish performance of AJAX applications. ULC applications easily keep pace with the performance requirements of knowledge workers and supports this user requirement out-of-the-box, i.e. you will not need to spend extra time trying to make your web application more responsive.

Link summary:
Why UltraLightClient? (Part 1)
Top reasons to use ULC
Case Studies

This is the fourth post in a series of posts that offer a preview of the new features in the upcoming UltraLightClient ‘08 release. The first post was about forms, the second post discusses invisible table models, the third post introduced the new application services. This post describes how to configure an UltraLightClient ‘08 application.

UltraLightClient ‘08 will provide an ultra easy way to configure your application. Currently, the application configuration is distributed in several places. And, the configuration method differs from place to place:

For example, to change the look and feel of your application you have to code this in your Applet launcher, your JNLP launcher, and your DevelopmentRunner. Or to configure a custom carrier stream provider (to compress transferred data or not), you have to code this in your Applet launcher, your JNLP launcher, your DevelopmentRunner. And for this configuration option you have to be careful to match the Servlet deployment descriptor to your client-side code changes. The result is error prone and redundant code.

This will change in UltraLightClient ‘08!

UltraLightClient ‘08 provides one central configuration file that holds all the configuration information. The configuration file format is an XML file. This format enables your IDE to provide code completion and documentation for the configuration options. This support makes it a lot easier and less error prone to configure your application than before:

As an example, let’s change the look and feel for your application. The <ulc:lookAndFeel> tag configures the look and feel to be used by all client environments. All environments read this configuration file and configure themselves accordingly. No need to write custom launchers or custom DevelopmentRunners! The configuration file that sets the system look and feel looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<ulc:ULCApplicationConfiguration xmlns:ulc="http://www.canoo.com/ulc"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.canoo.com/ulc ULCApplicationConfiguration.xsd ">

  <ulc:applicationName>
    com.canoo.ulc.testproject.view.HelloApplication
  </ulc:applicationName>

  <ulc:lookAndFeel>
    <ulc:standardLookAndFeel>SYSTEM</ulc:standardLookAndFeel>
  </ulc:lookAndFeel>

</ulc:ULCApplicationConfiguration>

Summary: UltraLightClient ‘08 makes it ultra easy to configure your application. No more need to write custom launchers and custom DevelopmentRunners.

Try out the new features in the latest milestone. Send us your feedback and help improve the UltraLightClient ‘08 release!

UltraLightClient 6.3 Milestone 1 of the upcoming ‘08 release is now available for download.

Evaluate the new features and send us your feedback!

For details see the milestone release notes or these recent blog posts discussing:

• forms,
• invisible table models,
• and application services

Please note: Milestone releases are not official releases. They provide early access to new features and fixed problem reports. They are provided for evaluation and testing purposes only. Please do not use milestone releases in a productive environment.