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

Soreco Group, one of Switzerland’s leading software houses, uses Canoo’s Rich Internet Application library to develop and distribute its flagship product Xpert.Ivy

Xpert.Ivy is a business process management platform for mid-sized and large corporations.

Inside-IT recently wrote:

Xpert.ivy 4.0 enthält nun GUI-Komponenten-Bibliotheken, mit denen man Anwenderoberflächen “zusammenklicken” kann. Die gesamte Logik der Oberflächen wird dabei serverseitig abgewickelt. Auf dem Client braucht es lediglich eine übliche Java Runtime Umgebung, um den RIA-Client (RIA – Rich Internet Application) laufen zu lassen.

Soreco verwendet für Xpert.ivy als OEM die “UltraLightClient”-Technologie des Basler RIA-Spezialisten Canoo. Die Schwerzenbacher bezeichnen die Möglichkeit, mit der BPM-Plattform nicht nur Prozesse und Webservices zu modellieren, sondern mit Version 4.0 gleich auch noch gut aussehende und funktionale RIA-Benützeroberflächen zu bauen, einen “Quantensprung.”

See also this recent press release by Soreco (in German).

Soreco is building their next generation platform using Canoo UltraLightClient. This is an awesome reference for Canoo. Being selected by an independent software vendor like Soreco underlines the stability and maturity of UltraLightClient.

Canoo recently published a new look for one of its UltraLightClient sample applications.

Our aim for this sample project was to show that Java web applications need not rely on the standard “grey and clunky” look and feel, but can be customized to fit into a company’s corporate design or to match current web design trends.

The design for the OnlineShop sample was developed by User Interface Design GmbH. Two Canoo developers then implemented the final design within two weeks.

The sample application can be accessed online:

Please note: you will need the Java plug-in to view the sample application.

Canoo has released a new sample application at ria-map.net. The application shows typical Web 2.0 interface elements such as tagging or Flickr-like editing fields.

I asked the developer, Jonas Zuberbühler, the following questions on the new Canoo sample application.

SW> What is riamap?

riamap is a Web 2.0 community site that maps the world of Rich Internet Applications. Unlike mere information aggregators on the topic, it builds on user contributions to assemble not only a list of current RIA technologies, but also how they relate to each other.

Users can explore what technologies are available, what they have in common, how they differentiate, what competitors they have and how they complement each other. These relations make up a graph that any user can extend by adding new connections or voting how strong any such connection based on his or her own judgment.

SW> What technologies did you use to build it?

We used Grails for the web application framework and Groovy as it is the perfect partner for implementing server-side logic.
In addition, we used Prototype, Scriptaculous and LivePipe to integrate AJAX features and to improve the user interface.

SW> Why did you select Grails? Why not adapt an existing PHP- or Java-based content management system?

Canoo has a strong footing in Java and Grails is the perfect choice for developing Web 2.0 applications on the Java platform. We can build on our solid understanding of this ecosystem and use all the existing tools for development, deployment and operations. On top of this, Grails provides us with the concise, expressive and interactive development style that modern applications require.

Further screenshots:

To get a login for riamap, sign up here to join riamap. Try out the various Web 2.0 interface features. If you feel like adding information on a RIA technology, enter the details here or edit an existing entry.