Last week we managed to cross out one of our ToDos lasting on the large ToDo list couple of months now: Aspect Oriented Programming! Since we appreciate demos with a UI on top instead of „console-only-demos“ we combined a CaptainCasa project with AOP and put some Spring stuff between as AOP usually never occurs without Spring.

I’m not gonna explain in detail what we did as we created a nice little doc which gives you an idea on weaving Spring and AspectJ into CaptainCasa. To those who simply want to know what’s behind AOP a good starting point and to those who want to „pimp“ a CaptainCasa project with AOP and Spring a good starting point as well.

The document can be found here and has been placed to our document section, as well.

As usually, feedback is appreciated!

We created some Java backend services and thought it would be pretty cool to put different frontend technologies on top of these services. On the one hand we did so in order to gather experience with the CaptainCasa framework, on the other hand we were curious to see an applet based frontend in direct comparison with a Flex frontend. This article is not "Applet versus Flex" it is much more about having one application with two different frontends - in order to discover the advantages of both frontend technologies...Read full post...

Tags: Applet or Flex, showcase

Did you ever hear about Pivot? Well, we did not - but what we read sounded good:

„Pivot is an open-source framework for building high-quality, cross-platform applications that are easily deployable both via the web and to the desktop. It began as an R&D effort at VMware and is now being made available to the community as an option for developers who want to build rich client applications in Java...“Read full post...

Tags: Applet

„Swing and JSF...?“ that's usually the first thing people keep asking when reading about the CaptainCasa Enterprise Client Technology. But the idea behind makes sense: JSF is the server server side standard framework for serving client side user interfaces. Typically used for creating HTML pages, it is now used to control a generic, Java Swing based client. CaptainCasa does not introduce a new proprietary server side processing, but bases on the same one (JSF) that you build web applications on.

And Swing? Well first of all, the application developer is not in direct contact with Swing at all when using CaptainCasa. The client is a generic one, i.e. it receives an XML layout specification from the server and sends back events. All is done through http protocol, imagine the client to be a browser on its own. Swing is a candidate which has been around for a while - much longer than "new technologies" such as Ajax & Co; I know several companies running mission critical applications using Swing User Interfaces since couple of years. Main problems typically are: (1) Swing development is not too simple and (2) Swing UIs look a bit old fashionned. Both seem to be overcome with CaptainCasa: as already said, the layout is specified in XML, there is no direct contact with Swing (exception: you want to add a new component on your own) - and: the rendering result is looking very nice! Have a look into the component demos: http://www.captaincasa.com/demozone.html. ...is this really Swing? - Yes, it is!Read full post...

Tags: Applet, showcase