richability Feedhttp://www.richability.com/index.htmlRich Client News!eninfo@richability.comCopyright 2008 richability2010-07-16T08:13:38+02:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 Fri, 16 Jul 2010 08:15:01 +0200RIA forum - back to Switzerland!info@richability.comOhne2010-07-16T08:13:38+02:00http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-41http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-41We are happy to announce the third RIA forum which will take place in Zurich, Switzerland! As the last forum has been „shipped“ to Germany it’s finally time to return to the roots and get back the forum to Switzerland, as this success story started in Basel...

Bildschirmfoto 2010-07-16 um 08.09.17

As usual we have invited known voices and framework pioneers from the space of Rich Internet Application development, of course networking is as well part of the event.

Instead of giving details here I recommend to visit the forum page directly: http://www.riaforum.com

Please be aware that we can only provide entrance to a limited audience, so if you want to join, make sure you sign up quickly.

Looking forward to meet you in Octobre,
cheers - Florian!
]]>Huge Ajaxian Step Downinfo@richability.comOhne2010-07-09T10:02:16+02:00http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-40http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-40Bildschirmfoto 2010-07-09 um 10.03.02

The Ajaxian.com founders Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer just announced to step down as editors of Ajaxian.com.

View Ajaxian announcement

TechTarget (they have already owned Ajaxian for a couple of time and organized several Ajax conferences within the U.S....) will take editorial ownership of Ajaxian.

It’s not the announcement itself which caused us to post this blog entry, it’s much more about the message of this step down which is: the most famous Ajax pioneers from the U.S. swallow their’s pride and official close the Ajax chapter.

This proves our approach to head for stable programming models (i.e. Rich/Fat Client solutions) enabling developers to focus on development rather than crossbrowser issues and JavaScript APIs. Ajax is not dead but obviously developers start opening their eyes after the Ajax hype, hopefully developers do not trap into the HTML5 trap which finally will end up the same...

]]>Flash Builder 4 & Java: Kickstartinfo@richability.comOhne2010-05-28T13:14:50+02:00http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-39http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-39

We are happy to announce our latest publication „Flash Builder 4 & Java: Kickstart“!

More than 250 pages introduction to Adobe Flex 4 and lot of examples on how to combine Flex 4 with Java. Anybody searching for a compact introduction to Flash Builder 4 concepts and coding should put this publication to his Amazon-Wishlist!

Amazon Link

Short Description:
„Java Entwickler und gutes Oberflächen Design? In der Vergangenheit eher die Ausnahme, mit Adobe Flash Builder 4 kann die Ausnahme jedoch zur Regel gemacht werden. Bisher war Flex Builder der Ausgangspunkt für die Erstellung von Adobe RIAs mit Java Backend, Design und Entwicklung lagen somit im Aufgabenbereich des Entwicklers. Mit Flash Builder 4 wird der Entwicklungsprozess um einen Schritt ergänzt, Catalyst heißt das Bindeglied zwischen Designer und Entwickler, das es ermöglicht, eine strikte Trennung der Aufgabenbereiche umzusetzen - und somit den klassischen "Flex-Fingerabdruck" aus der Anwendung zu entfernen. Denn Komponentenlimitierungen und Vorgaben gehören zukünftig der Vergangenheit an. Das Buch führt Sie in die Erstellung von Rich Client Lösungen mit Adobe Catalyst, Flash Builder 4 und Java ein. Dabei wird jeder Schritt des Entwicklungsprozess durchlaufen und mit zahlreichen Beispielen unterlegt. Abschließend sind Sie in der Lage sowohl die Designer- als auch Entwicklerperspektive bei der Umsetzung von Flex Unternehmens Anwendungen einzunehmen. Folgende Themen werden behandelt: - Big Picture: Java, Flash Builder, - Installation/Setup, Entwicklungsumgebung - Catalyst - vom Mockup zum Click Dummy - Flash Builder 4, ActionScript & MXML - Flex & Java Kommunikation (BlazeDS) - Adobe Photoshop Basics - Beispielimplementierung: Photoshop - Catalyst - Flash Builder - Java - UI Testing“

Feel free to contact us for multiple orders,
your richability team.

]]>RIA Forum - Slides published to webpageinfo@richability.comOhne2010-05-01T13:22:16+02:00http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-37http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-37Bildschirmfoto 2010-01-11 um 09.18.15

We are happy to look back to a successfull second RIA Forum event in Darmstadt, we received lots of positive feedback so we keep following this track! Next forum will be announced soon, we recently published the slides from the last event as well as some pictures - maybe we caught you in a snapshot as well? Have a look!

http://www.riaforum.com

Cheers, Florian!]]>Flex JasperReports component releasedinfo@richability.comOhne2010-02-14T14:25:54+01:00http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-36http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-36

Generating nice reports within the context of a Flex application is pretty easy - there are dozens of Charting libraries enabling you to create nice colored interactive charts. But all these libraries have a common pain point: you can not export the report data. Which means, presenting your quarterly results in a meeting fails gracefully or you have to fire up a Flex client. And if the controller asks you to send these results in order to use this data within his calculation you usually end up in populating clumsy Excel sheets and putting each value from the application to the Excel sheet...

Ok, there are LiveCycle Data Services, these will enable you to create magnificent reports by querying your database directly...this would be the Adobe answer, and as you know, LCDS is pretty expensive..so is there no way of creating PDF/Excel/RTF reports with Flex?

Basically there is not, at least there is nothing like an easy to use component which can be used to perform this task. Reason enough for us to create this component! In the backend we are using JasperReports, the frontend component can be embedded to Flex directly - see the component in action right here (dont pay attention to the primitive component layout used, focus on the component and layout of the component instead of the demo control panels...):

Flex 3 component Demo

Flex 4 component Demo (looks nicer, custom metal skin has been created)

We wont get into component details here, therefore we have created a Developer Guide which will give you all information regarding JasperReport, Flex and our component, please have a look into the guide it’s very detailed and even so you never used JasperReports/iReports before the guide will give you a good introduction.

There are two different distributions of the component available: one is a free distribution, this distribution is limited to PDF generation only, so you can not generate Word (rtf) and Excel (xls). If you want to generate Word and Excel as well (two more buttons in the menu bar) you have to purchase the component, pricing is 99$ (70€/105CHF) - simply drop a mail to sales@richability.com, we will send you the component as well as billing information.

The free component bundle can be downloaded right here, it’s available for Flex 4 and Flex 3:

mireport (Flex 3)

mireport (Flex 4)

Flex and Reporting is a MUST HAVE to any enterprise application. Without a clean reporting interface your whole application will end up in a workaround, so the result is a typical Flex workaround application. If you want to head for enterprise development instead of Flex workarounds you should have a closer look into our Flex Reporting component - as PDF, Word or Excel generation can be achieved easily without workarounds...

For any further questions contact us, have fun with Flex & Reporting - your richability team!]]>RIA Forum comes to Darmstadt, 23rd of April 2010!info@richability.comOhne2010-01-11T09:16:33+01:00http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-35http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-35Bildschirmfoto 2010-01-11 um 09.18.15

We are happy to announce the second RIA forum which will take place in Darmstadt (close to Frankfurt), 23rd of April 2010! As usual we have invited known voices and framework pioneers from the space of Rich Internet Application development, of course networking is as well part of the event.

Instead of giving details here I recommend to visit the forum page directly: http://www.riaforum.com

Please be aware that we can only provide entrance to a limited audience, so if you want to join, make sure you sign up quickly.

Looking forward to meet you in April,
cheers - Florian!
]]>iPhone CMS "MiShop" released by richabilityinfo@richability.comOhne2009-11-23T05:22:11+01:00http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-34http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-34

Creating an iPhone application in order to mirror products requires Objective-C knowledge? Creating an iPhone application is expensive? OUTDATED!

richability created an iPhone Content Management System (CMS) which enables customers to mirror their product and category structure to the iPhone - based on a native iPhone client, no „Pseudo HTML Client“. Please check out the screencast in order to get an impression of the whole system in action, demonstrating the interaction between iPhone client and serverside data interface.

We have created a new Products tab on our page, the „MiShop“ CMS can be found there as well as several related documents.

MiShop demonstrates as well a nice Java Flex example proving that Flex can be used pretty easily to create complex applications with a high number of subpages - it’s all just a matter of clean and structured programming ;-)

Please contact us for further pricing and licencing questions, MiShop easily can be adapted to any customer within minutes - stop creating your own iPhone app and use a CMS! The same way companies reduce cost for web development by using Content management Systems, the same way companies can reduce cost for their iPhone shop representation!


]]>zk 5 released!info@richability.comOhne2009-09-30T12:19:27+02:00http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-32http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-32

zk 5 has been released this week - currently we did not have time to take a detailed look into the new features, but here is a quick overview of the new features of zk 5:

"The ZK team is pleased to release ZK 5 RC with its developer-centric and architectural innovation such as Server+Client Fusion and Ajax-as-a-Service.
Since 2005 ZK has been renowned for its’ server-centric approach, providing the ultimate in productivity gains. In addition, developers can now optionally leverage the full controllability of client-side programming. It is not about server-centric or client-centric, it is about developer-centric!

With the release of ZK 5 RC come some very important changes.

• Server+Client Fusion: With ZK 5’s new architecture, developers can not only leverage the productivity boost of the server-centric architecture, but also the full controllability and instant responsiveness of client-side programming.

• jQuery: ZK 5 now allows developers to maximize the user experience using enterprise-level ZK widgets and the simplicity of jQuery.
This opens up a whole range of possibilities for client effects such as the stock system which is demonstrated here.

• Ajax-as-a-Service: ZK 5 now brings the ability to load client-side JavaScript packages from distributed servers. This delivers EAI integration client-side, enabling the same close knit ease of backend integration but at the client!"

For more information click here!


]]>Enterprise Flex Forum releasedinfo@richability.comOhne2009-09-14T20:18:42+02:00http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-31http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-31

Using Flex out of the box and creating some "three pagers" is not our understanding of Enterprise development. In order to use Flex for enterprise purposes a lot more is required. Starting with basic topics such as project structure there might rise sophistic ones such as UI patterns and correpsonding frameworks. Or simply consider databinding: should you head for a Spring based solution or simply use RemoteObjects via BlazeDS?

Goal of our Flex Enterprise forum is to answer exactly questions like this: it's not about answering stuff such as "...how can I size my button to 138px...?", it's rather intendet to advanced topics auch as special enterprise related topics.

We know, it takes some time to establish things like this in the market - but we are pretty optimistic there will rise a small community which some day might "live" on it's own, without us being the ones answering all questions. Anyway, we are looking forward to your questions (and of course solution!) submissions, the forum can be accessed via:

http://www.enterprise-flex.com

Bildschirmfoto 2009-09-14 um 22.09.47

Have fun, your richability team!

P.S.: Don't be afraid to post the first entry - forum won't hurt you! ;-)]]>RIA Forum Basel - Updateinfo@richability.comRIA Forum2009-07-22T07:20:23+02:00http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-30http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-30

Thanx to JAXFront, Comit and CaptainCasa we managed to „open“ RIA Forum, the forum is free of any participation fees now, as these will be covered completely by our three sponsoring partners. The number of participants therefore has been limited, so sign up quickly in order to join RIA Forum.

Location is available as well now, we will meet directly within the Basler „Messturm“, that’s where the Get-Together after the forum will take place, as well.

Again, thanx a lot to our sponsoring partners - we are looking forward to see as many of you as possible in September!
]]>CaptainCasa, Spring & AspectJinfo@richability.comcaptaincasaApplet2009-07-07T05:41:29+02:00http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-29http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-29performancebar

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! ]]>Java Flex Book - urgent noticeinfo@richability.comFlexJava & FlexBuch2009-06-27T19:21:25+02:00http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-28http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-28error forbidden

Unfortunately the current DVD version within the book „Professionelle Rich Client Lösungen mit Flex & Java“ contains a packaging error: all sub folders contain the Linux compression extension .gz; in order to import a project you have to step through all subfolders and extract each file which is clumsy work.

We prepared two new bundles which do not contain this error, the corrected bundles (mirror DVD 1:1) can be downloaded here, simply click on of the items below:

Full Windows Bundle (1:1 DVD), 1.3GB
Windows Eclipse Projects only, 85MB

Full Mac Bundle (1:1 DVD), 1.3GB
Mac Eclipse Projects only, 85MB


We apologize for this issue and kindly ask you to use the bundles above, the DVD bundles work as well but are kind of „deprecated“!

Best regards, Florian Müller!

]]>Java-Flex book by richability released!info@richability.comFlexJava & FlexJava2009-06-22T22:25:56+02:00http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-27http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-27
We proudly present: Professional Rich Client solutions with Flex & Java!

buch

A long road has come to an end...! Today we finally managed to release the book „Professionelle Rich Client Lösungen mit Flex & Java“ (currently available only in German language - English will follow soon...);

the book is kind of allround guide giving beginners a good Flex/Java ramp up, advanced Flex/Java engineers can benefit from the book as well, since couple of advanced topics (Flex - Java - JPA, Spring, Multilanguage Management, Messaging etc.) are treated as well.

The book contains a fully blown ready to rund Eclipse/Flex environment and ships with a lot of examples enabling the reader rather to learn Flex than reading about Flex only. The book covers the following topics:

  • Flex - Java - BlazeDS background knowledge
  • Flex Java Setup
  • Basic Flex examples
  • Connecting Flex and Java
  • Accessing a MySQL database from Felx via Java/JPA (Hibernate)
  • Validations
  • Messaging
  • Spring Integration
  • Web Service access
  • AIR
  • Testing
  • 30 frequent Flex/Java questions - and corresponding answers!

Publishing house is Addison Wesley, the book can be ordered via Amazon: Link

I would like to thank everybody involved into this project - and of course I’m looking forward to feedback from our first readers!

Have fun reading the book, Florian!

]]>Flash Builder 4 Beta released!info@richability.comAdobe Flex2009-06-02T18:36:24+02:00http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-26http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-26

Well, today we finally received the message we were waiting so long for: Flash Builder 4 Beta released (Link)!

First of all to everybody who is wondering about „FLASH“-Builder 4, it’s not a typo, Adobe decided to use the Flash naming instead of continuing with Flex. Currently there are thousands of discussions in the web debating about Flash/Flex naming pros and cons - we simply think this was a stupid decission as the Flex seed just started to grow in the space of Java (enterprise) development, now there is a new seed which again needs to prove in this space and this, again, will take some time.

Flash Builder 4 focuses on three major topics:

  • Design in Mind: providing a framework that supports a new degree of expressiveness, easily enabled with tools.
  • Developer Productivity: improving compiler performance and adding productivity enhancements to language features like data binding.
  • Framework Evolution: taking advantage of new Flash Player capabilities and adding features required by common use-cases.

Ok, but let’s get back to Flash Builder 4 - based on the Flex SDK 4 we were really looking forward to this release, since we were expecting boosting new features. After installation (we used the Eclipse plugin variant) Flash Builder 4 was up and running and we created our first app. Bute where have Adobe’s brilliant control adjustment features gone? Usually it was possible to create a nice screen with symmetric adjustment of controls based on this useful helper - now it seems it’s up to the developer’s eyes to adjust on his own...maybe there is a little option hidden somewhere, help is highly appreciated, otherwise I’m really afraid of my first Flex GUIs based on Flash Builder...

Control libraries pretty much look the same as Flex Builder 3 control libraries, as these were already covering a big bandwidth it was and still is a comfortable control set which enables developers to create their application straight forward without creating any „control workarounds“.

Finally we tried to setup a first BlazeDS enabled project, and as we are using Eclipse with Web Tools Platform plugin we wanted to create our BlazeDS app as usual and deploy the app to Tomcat. But that was exactly the point when we skipped all further Flash Builder 4 attempts, since the BlazeDS dialog does not show up and we had to integrated the libs and config on our own via copy & paste...

Ok, so the 2nd bullet point „Developer Productivity“ currently does not apply to the Beta version, as we were struggeling from one pain point to the next - we do not deny there is a lot of documentation around, and maybe sometimes reading this documentation can avoid these pitfalls, but we want to develop - so a smart two pager describing briefly how to sourround these pitfalls really would be great, Adobe!

Framework Evolution so far could not be proved. But we found some nice features such as „Execute Flex Unit Tests“, or several data binding menus indicate - something happened, or let’s say is in progress of happening...

Bild 14 Bild 15

Regarding designer/developer hand in hand development so far we can only say - something „big“ ships with Adobe Catalyst, and several screencasts demonstrated: if you are able to use these tools such as Adobe Illustrator or Adobe Photoshop you can easily produce magnificent GUIs - but always keep in mind, as a single developer you have to learn these frameworks/tools first, until then you better should use Fash Builder as starting point in stead of wasting too much time for design stuff...

Our conclusion regarding Flash Builder 4 Beta: it’s a pretty early Beta, sometimes we feel it’s better to release a stable Beta two weeks later instead of having thousands of developers banging their heads against walls...but that’s political and as we focus on technical facts here, let’s put it in a nutshell: several needful functions and features will ship with Flash Builder 4, but better wait until these features are supported at least 80% instead of trying to use them just for being the first one...]]>RIA Forum Basel announcedinfo@richability.comRIA Forum2009-04-22T09:32:10+02:00http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-25http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-25

We are happy to announce the first RIA forum, 18th of September located in Basel. There is a simple idea the RIA forum is based on: experts exchange! There will be three excellent speakers dealing with „hot“ RIA topics, duration of the forum will be Friday afternoon - we thought that’s a pretty good time frame as three compressed high quality sessions are much better than full scheduled day where people looking forward rather for lunch than for session contents!

Please visit www.riaforum.com

We are looking forward to your registration, contact us (info@richability.com) in case of questions. Btw., anybody interested in sponsorship?

Looking forward seeing you in September,
your richability team!
]]>ICEFaces versus zk - performanceinfo@richability.comICEFaceszkAjaxJSF2009-03-17T05:56:04+01:00http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-24http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-24

Often people keep asking which path to follow regarding UI technologies. On the one hand, there are standards, such as JSF - and usually standards are something „long-lasting“, so if you decide to use a JSF implementation for your app you can be pretty sure that your application and the technology behind will survive the next few years. But „next few years...“ is a little bit weak, isn’t it? Basically we are talking about STANDARDS, so we should be able to expect survival of the technology for more than „few years...“. Just think about car manufacturing: certain screws are used in order to mount the wheels - and there are wrenches with standard sizes, exactly these standard sizes ensure that people still will be able to mount new tires to their Dodge Nitro or whatever twenty years later...

But regarding Software development we are far away from unmounting tires in twenty years. Of course Software development is a pretty fast changing environment, but even during short periods standards are adapted only very poorly. The problem: often these standards keep growing somewhere far away from real software development, in consequence the standard is far away from closing gaps between software development and industry. You still remember EJB?? EJB is as well one of these standards causing rather headache than adressing productive software development...and suddenly there was Spring, not a standard, but adopted in nearly any Java project!

The same refers to the UI layer and JSF. There are thousands of projects using JSF, but there are as well billions of developers complaining about JSF coding - especially in case JSF is used „from the scratch“ without any framework above implementing JSF. So if you are thinking about usage of JSF for a small project without any JSF implementation such as MyFaces or ICEFaces, forget about it, project cost will explode and after two weeks developers will start suggesting usage of plain HTML/JavaScript as they are so slow using JSF...

But even if you refer to a framework implementing JSF standard the question remains whether the framework is really best choice, just for the reason of adopting JSF. ICEFaces is one of the most spreaded JSF frameworks, on the other hand there is zk which is currently one of the most spreaded „Ajax-Non-JSF“ frameworks. If you compare these to frameworks regarding development speed and ramp up time, the question „ICEFaces or zk...?“ results in the question „Standard or Comfort...?“. The ICEFaces WYSIWIG editor is very poorly so usually developers end up in plain JSF tag coding. But aspects such as development speed and ramp up time are only minor aspects when deciding about UI technologies. It’s much more important to have a clue regarding scalability of technologies: will the ICEFaces application still perform when the app is deployed to a server? What about x concurrent users accessing the app? Recently we came across a nice paper comparing exactly these aspects, on the one hand ICEFaces, on the other zk;

we thought this is a pretty interesting comparison, reason enough to share within the richability info space.

Have fun reading this comparison (simply click the report below), maybe this report is a little help for your next UI technology choice in a project.

article

]]>ZK 3.6 released!info@richability.comAjax2009-03-05T07:58:06+01:00http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-23http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-23

Recently zk 3.6.0 has been released - there are couple of new features, for a detailed feature description refer to the feature list.

By the way, zk now provides a WYSIWIG editor, which can be easily installed as Eclipse plugin. So you can drag and drop your GUI without switching to your browser and hitting continously F5.

wysiwigPlugin

One more point we would like to mention: zk framework is growing rapidly! Some time has passed since we downloaded the last release, but as we took a quick look into the zk explorer we were really surprised about the number of new components. Check out the zk explorer it will give you a clue on what we are talking about...! We will keep focused closely on zk, as from our impression zk is (becoming) one of the leading enterprise Ajax frameworks. If you did not evaluate zk for now, you should give it a try in order to move away from clumsy JavaScript coding with simple Ajax frameworks...]]>Flex/JSF tutorial addedinfo@richability.comJSF2008-12-02T05:24:52+01:00http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-22http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-22

Just a quick update: we have added a Flex/JSF tutorial for beginners into our tutorial section. So anybody looking for a Flex/JSF ramp up, this is a good starting point...]]>Flex & JSFinfo@richability.comAdobe FlexJava & FlexJSF2008-11-21T09:07:33+01:00http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-20http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-20bar

Some weeks ago Exadel announced an extension called Fiji to JavaServer Faces to fully encapsulate Flex. As we like evaluating technologies by using them we created a little demo which uses a JSF „backend“ and a Flex user interface. Currently we are in progress of creating a nice little tutorial which enables you to create your own JSF/Flex application within minutes, the tutorial will be released next week.

Ok, let’s get back to our evaluation. First of all there are two major „tracks“ you can follow using Fiji, one is to head for Flex charting solutions which simply can be placed into your application with some lines lines of jsp Code. The following Fiji tag for example will generate the chart displayed below, the chart on the right is just another example.

    <fiji:stackedColumnChart id="stackedColumnChart" value="#{SCBeanSimple.data}"
                             title="Simple Stacked Column Chart" subtitle="Display Resolution Statistics"                            captionX="Years" captionY="Percent" legendCaption="Resolution" 
                             barColors="#{SCBeanSimple.colors}" width="400" height="400"
                             rulersValuesHighlight="none">
        <fiji:chartData type="name" value="#{SCBeanSimple.names}" />
    fiji:stackedColumnChart>

Bild 2
Bild 3


The Fiji charting modules look pretty cool and simply can be tied into your application. The charts provide interactive behavior, the drawing process is executed fancy and smoothly, moving the mouse over the chart results in immediate value display - in a nutshelle, pretty cool stuff to pimp up your JSF UI!

But as already mentioned Fiji is more than charting: the charts add Flex capabilities to JSF applications, but what if you have to add JSF capapbilities to a Flex application? Fiji includes a JSF wrapper which enables you to integrate a Flex GUI into a JSF page easily. And Fiji goes step beyond this as Fiji provides the possibility to pass JSF parameters to the integrated Flex GUI (swf). Using this SWF wrapping in combination with parmeter passing enables developers to link the Flex properties entirely to a managed Bean, for example!

But anyway, Fiji should not be used instead of BlazeDS (the Adobe Framework connect Flex and Java), BlazeDS is still the weapon of choice if you want to link Java backends with a Flex user interface. BlazeDS and Fiji shouldn’t be compared anyway, as it is not the goal of the Fiji framework to somehow replace BlazeDS. Fiji should be rather seen as an opportunity if you have an existing JSF application and for some reasons want to add a Flex UI on top of this application, for power users for example who might prefer a highly performant Rich Client instead of a Web GUI.

To cut long storries short, Fiji is a pretty smart solution in order to combine Flex and JSF, and it is good to know that there exists a framework to do so! Simply keep the name Fiji in your head a solution based on JSF combined with a Flex UI is always ace up your’s sleeve especially when discussing Flex and Standards!

button

]]>richability major page updateinfo@richability.comrichability2008-11-15T00:03:51+01:00http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-19http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-19richability launched!info@richability.comblog2008-06-28T06:27:21+02:00http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-18http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-18
richability

Do you remeber this technology called "Ajax"? Yes, the thing which enabled developers to create these beautiful user interfaces with drag&drop, auto sorting tables and rich client like frontends!

ajax

And are you as well one of the guys who followed this hype? Well, then you might be as well one of the candidates fighting now against performance windmills, cross browser issues (even the distributor of the JavaScript library promised there were not!) as well as permanently searching for developers who understand the magic frontend code in order to maintain and etxend the your application...

web20

Ok - this was little exaggerated. But there is a bit of truth in this and the time has come to consider that Ajax is a solid techology which enabled the web 2.0 to take off, but it will not be the state of the art technology for enterprises. For all these great applications such as flickr, GoogleMaps & Co it is (and will) stay best fit, but when talking about the implementation of a large billing system in a company it might be 2nd choice only.

„So what's next?“, you might wonder. Instead of observing the beach and waiting for a web 3.0 wave we simply recommend to stay tuned regarding new user interface technologies - which this is exactly the goal of richability.com!

questionmark

richability contains a blog which informs frequently about the new happenings in the space of user interface technologies and corresponding backend technologies. But as blogs usually are "hints" only which will not prevent you from a detailed technology evaluation, richability.com provides an example corner which enables our reader to really "feel" the technologies rather than reading about these technologies only. And, richability.com provides control libraries (currently Flex 3 libraries only) which will help you to make development easier!

We hope you like our mix of demos, writing, tips & tricks and we hope we can put some light into the next generation of application development - the rich client era!

]]>Flex & Java - good friends...info@richability.comJava & Flex2008-06-29T06:21:08+02:00http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-17http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-17
airFlex

Unfortunately one of the first things people keep thinking about when hearing about Flex is Flash; and when thinking about Flash, people usually have these fancy animation stuff in their mind which is used as intro for gaming pages and other freaky web content...

But this chain of thoughts is completely outdated. In 2006 Adobe launched their Flex platform (Flex 2) which enables developers to create applications without the Flash typical time line. Suddenly there were real components (the so called mxml components since the extesnions is .mxml) as well as a powerful programming language (which is called Flex) - and user interface engineers were able to create pretty interactive GUIs running in the Flash Player. Maybe the possibilities in Flex 2 were pretty limited campared to Flex 3, but the basic track was given...

BTW maybe it is not only this „Flex - Flash chain“ which causes people to think about Flex apps as „animation stuff“, the runtime environment (the Flash Player) sounds as well pretty much like movie and fancy GUI stuff. But people should consider this Player much more as a runtime such as JRE rather than an animation player, because that's what it really is.

Now, having said Flex is a powerful programming language and the Flash Player should be considered as a simple plugin, let's talk about wiring a Flex frontend to some sort of backend. Flex GUIs can be wired to several technologies, and the first search results Google fires up usually have something to do with Life Cycle Data Services or ColdFusion. Another reason people keep thinking "uh oh, this sounds proprietary I should better chose another technology...

Being honestly, in the past that was exactly the business case behind Flex, the UI technology and the development environment were available free (or limitedt to a single CPU), but as soon as servers and backend stuff came in the whole thing got pretty expensive...

Fortunately this has changed, and scrolling down your Google search results to the bottom will result in several entries which contain: „BlazeDS“

BlazeDS is a technology which enables you to link Flex frontends easily to Java Backend Objects and Services. We will not talk in detail here about how to configure blazeDS and what it is exactly about, but basically you can think about BlazeDS as a blackbox between your Flex frontend and your server side Java, all synchronization stuff and communication between client and server will be handled by blazeDS. blazeDS is open source, so the only thing you have to pay when creating a professional Flex application with a server side Java counter part is the Java developer.

Since the arise of BlazeDS development of Flex applications became much more professional: a user interface engineer can do the UI development decoupled from the server side counter part. On the server side (=Java) an engineer can provide services which do the "real work", the business logic. BlazeDS can be used in order to link these parts and your Flex/Java app is ready to run.

Please refer to our demo section, within there you will find several examples which have been created based on Java, blazeDS and Flex. You will find out that these applications interact the same way solid Rich Internet Applications (RIA) would do - simply have a try and you will „feel“ that Flex is much more than fabcy GUI stuff!

E-Mail Manager: send receive E-Mails via an arbitrary POP/SMTP account.

Contact Manager: add your contacts to the adress book and link in some geo data

Java & Flex for beginners: a good starting point!]]>CaptainCasa - Swing based UIs with JSF backend!info@richability.comApplet2008-06-30T06:15:46+02:00http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-16http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-16captaincasa_final

"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!

Regarding the JSF approach: all discussions about this approach could be shut down by throwing in the killer argument „it's a standard...“ but that's not what I'm gonna do here. Instead of this I kindly ask you to google for "jsf success story", which will give you a large list of independent successful JSF projects - this is a much more serious prove for the JSF approach rather than the "standard argument"...

Having proven that each of the technologies, JSF and Swing, are solid proven technologies it should be easy to understand why combining these technologies makes sense. It's just that nobody did this before...

Detailed informtion on the combination of JSF and Swing in the CaptainCasa Enterprise Client can be found here: JSF & Swing

So you want to know how a Swing/JSF application feels like? Make sure you have a Java Runtime plugin installed on your client (Java WebsStart or a JRE), then simply follow this link which will take you to a small demo app: Personal Information Manager

Did you like it? Then you will like even more the way of developing CaptainCasa applications since the whole JSF part is covered from the developer. The developer can focus on the business logic which is the point he needs to hook in. Again, all JSF related stuff is capsulated, so you really can start coding without knowing much about JSF!

For the user interface development there is a nice drag & drop enabled editor which enables developers to create the UI fastly and easily. Please refer to one of the vide tutorials on CaptainCasa, this will give you a quick impression how easily this editor can be used.

In a nutshell, CaptainCasa technology is a great approach from a developers point of view. It is completely based on standards and the standards (which usually are more complicated regarding usage than the non-standards) are ready to use out of the box.

We try to create a killerapp based on CaptainCasa as soon as possible, as we are sure that CaptainCasa is one of the favorites for becoming a solid player in the space of Rich Client development. It's not that a "noisy" rocket technology as Flex, but small rockets can rise high as well..
]]>Pivot - another framework riding the Applet waveinfo@richability.comApplet2008-07-01T06:08:36+02:00http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-15http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-15pivot_java_final

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...“

While Pivot was designed to be familar to web developers who have experience building AJAX applications using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, it provides a much richer set of standard widgets than HTML, and allows developers to create sophisticated user experiences much more quickly and easily. Pivot will also seem familiar to Swing developers, as both Swing and Pivot are based on Java2D and employ a model-view-controller (MVC) architecture to separate component data from presentation. However, Pivot includes additional features that make building modern GUI applications much easier, including declarative UI, data binding, and web services integration....

Pivot is Applet based which proves again that the reincarnation of applets has started - have a look into the Pivot demo area which gives you an overview on the available controls: in the space of web development we would call a control library like the Pivot library a "very large and rich library" since the library offers all kind of controls for professional user interface development.

User interface development with Pivot is similar to what most Rich Client frameworks do: there is a declarative language which enables you to define the user interface, the user interface definition is stored with the extension .wtkx.

At runtime, the Pivot applet loads the user interface definition (the wtkx file) and translates the definition to controls. As we are in the space of an applet you can code your application events and listener directly in Java, have a look into the Pivot tutorial which will give you a quick introduction.

Unfortuantely Pivot is not well documented and as it is one of the Newcomer frameworks you will not be ablle to find large Google search results. And, you will not be able to use a layout editor or something similar to create your user interface which currently is one of the biggest manquos.

But anyway, Pivot is an example that applets are still, around and that there certainly might rise more applet based frameworks in the future..]]>Google Maps for Flex!info@richability.comAdobe Flex2008-07-05T06:00:22+02:00http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-14http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-14
google_flex_final

Recently Google launched a Flex API which now enables Flex developers to benefit from the great advantages of using geo data. Previously, this has been privileged to JavaScript developers only.

We checked out the API and found that it is a really cool API. We created a nice showcase for you and the API is really easy to use. Nearly all features from the JavaScript API have been integrated, but due to the usage of Flex instead of JavaScript it is possible to create application without any coding - the only thing which basically needs to be done via keyboard is entering a valid Google Maps API key...

There are several nice examples on Google,if you want to have a look into these examples follow this link: Google Maps Flex Examples

From our point of view this is a clear signal to the Flex technology: Flex isn't recognized as the „...isn't this Flash...“-technology anymore, it is rather taken as a serious technology for developing professional user interfaces.

The one and only downside of the current Google Maps API for Flex: you can not use it within AIR applications. So anybody attempting to create an AIR application featuring geo data - forget about it! Currently there is no announcement when the API will be available for AIR applications.]]>Searchable Rich Client appsinfo@richability.comAdobe Flex2008-07-06T05:39:06+02:00http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-13http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-13
google_swf_final

Great news for Flex developers (and Flex consumers!) - not just from a technical point of view, as this anouncement contains a symbolic character, as well:

Google and Yahoo! anounced SWF searchability!

For those being not familar with Flex, the swf stands for "Shockwave Flash" and is the file extension of applications created with Flex - as executable programs might have a .exe extension for example, Flex applications have .swf.

 But unfortunately search engines are not able to search in .swf applications, which means if you have created a beautiful record store Flex application, Google will not come up with any search results referencing your records....not until yesterday!

Adobe anounced in a press release that they are working together with Google and Yahoo! in order to integrate swf contents into their search spiders, which is really great news! And the roll out already started...!

As we think Adobe explained much better what they are doing than we could sum up here, we recommend to read the full press realease here.

But as richability usually tries to let you "feel" applications features and frameworks rather than blogging only, we thought what about a little test? So we created a Mini-Flex app below, the application contains a static label and a dynamic text which is being displayed when clicking a button. From what they wrote in the Adobe press release, both types (static and dynamic Flex content) should be found by a Google/Yahho! spider. As richability.com is a pretty new site, we are aware that the Google spiders currently do not hit our page daily...it's more something between seven and fourteen days, so please don't expect the examples to be found within the next three hours...but with the signal lights we will indicate whether the contents were spidered or not!

So below there is a Flex application and a simple HTML Page which contain "spiderable" content , the SWF file contains the labels "find_Me_I_am_A_Static_Flex_Label_In_A_Swf_File" (static) and "find_Me_I_am_A_Dynamic_Flex_Label_In_A_Swf_File" (dynamic generated when pressing a button); the HTML file contains the content "'find_Me_I_am_A_Static_Html_Label", that's just for comparison as HTML should be found without any difficulties.

Right here we put the links to the applications, which hopefully will cause the spider to follow the links:
http://www.richability.com/infospace/spider/spider.swfscreenshot
http://www.richability.com/infospace/spider/static.htmlstatic


What do we expect to see when pressing one of the Google search links below? Well, in case that Google really opened our SWF and read the content we should find at last one Google result when pressing the link - currently there do not appear any links! In a nutshell: if we see a search result when searching for find_Me_I_am_A_Static_Flex_Label_In_A_Swf_File for example, then our test succeeded!

For those who do not want to test the Google query links below we prepared the results with little icons, the red traffic light of course stands for "no results found...".

The static swf link (find_Me_I_am_A_Static_Flex_Label_In_A_Swf_File)trafficlight_green
The dynamic swf link (find_Me_I_am_A_Dynamic_Flex_Label_In_A_Swf_File)trafficlight_green

The statics HTML link (find_Me_I_am_A_Static_Html_Label)
trafficlight_green

And now, have fun with this experiment - we are really curious to see the outputs!
]]>OpenLaszlo - a new approach to web application developmentinfo@richability.comOpenLaszlo2008-07-26T15:16:40+02:00http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-12http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-12flex_ol_logo_final

OpenLaszlo:Free open-source alternative to FLEX

In the time of new uprising technologies to create so called Rich Internet Applications (RIA's), where the weapon of choice is still Flash, the tools and techniques have changed. The "old" Flash Builder IDE is still a nice application to create any kind of RIA's but hands down: Where designers get a very usable toolkit for creating nice User interfaces, the "real" programmer wants more and crys for technologies such as FLEX or OpenLaszlo

5 Quick OpenLaszlo facts
  • OpenLaszlo is a similar technology to FLEX using XML and JavaScript, but based on the idea of open source
  • OpenLaszlo is completely free of charge
  • OpenLaszlo can create both, Flash and DHTML/AJAX
  • OpenLaszlo goes down to Flash5, FLEX supports only version 7 and higher
  • OpenLaszlo is coming for mobile applications using Sun's JavaME technology


Costs
Unlike FLEX, you won't have to pay a cent for neither the development server nor any IDE (There is none for Laszlo anyway), which makes OL (OpenLaszlo) a quite nice alternative for beginners who don't have a student's license for the FLEX IDE or enough money to spend it on that. All you need to develop Laszlo applications is the application server and an editor of your choice like vim. Actually even notepad would do the job.

Flash or DHTML/AJAX output
As mentioned before, OL can compile your code into either swf or transform the xml into clean DHTML/AJAX (html+javascript). This is probably the most astonishing feature in OL since both, the flash and the DHTML/AJAX version, have exactly the same look & feel. You can try that out in the showcase on the official OpenLaszlo website, which offers remakes of popular web applications like youtube or amazon.com, made with OL. Don't forget here to choose if you want to start the flash or DHTML/AJAX application since you will notice almost no difference between both.

logo

FLEX vs OpenLaszlo
You may have already asked yourself, which is better. FLEX or Laszlo? Where are the differences? What do they have in common and which is the right one for me? Let's try to find out.
First of all, both have a lot in common like the xml based syntax, the component model, javascript/actionscript and the modularity for additional third party code. This means, that while you are actually developing your app, you will find a lot of similarities between both technologys. I personally believe that the most important differences are the license policy, popularity and compatibility issues.

  • License policy
This one is simple. Laszlo is completely free of charge. You won't have to pay for anything while Adobe charges at least for the FLEX IDE which is a quite nice tool for developers especially if it comes up to skinning of your UI.


  • Popularity
After the assimilation of Macromedia by Adobe many common and well known webdevelopment-applications like Dreamweaver or Flash belong now to the creator of Photoshop, which makes it very easy for them to reach a wide popularity for their new products FLEX and AIR. Laszlo on the other side is only well known by insiders of the scene who seek for alternatives. Laszlo Systems, the creators of OpenLaszlo don't have the financial power like Adobe to run big advertisement campaigns. This leads to a big problem: The less a development platform is known, the fewer developers will produce code for third party plugins and modules. While there are quite a lot of pre-made scripts and modules out there for FLEX, the laszlo developer will have to build a lot by own hand.


  • Compatibility issues
A big advantage of laszlo is the already mentioned ability to let the developer and/or the user choose wether to use a Flash version or the DHTML/AJAX alternative, where first mentioned requires at least Flash5. FLEX, on the other side, can only output Flash while its plugin must be at least version 7. This leads to compatibility problems with users, who don't have an updated version of their flash plugin installed or maybe no plugin at all (Which doesn't happen that often, tbh). Laszlo developers have the big advantage at this point to simply transform their code into DHTML/AJAX code, which should work in every more or less modern browser.



So, what should I take?
This one ain't that difficult as you might think. If you're already a FLEX developer and you're doing fine, stick to it. There is no reason to switch if you like FLEX. The skinning abilities and the big community behind it make it a solid development platform for RIA's.
If you're short on money to buy the FLEX IDE or just like the idea of open source, you might want to check out OpenLaszlo, which has no real big disadvantage compared to FLEX. On top of that the OL documentation ist quite clean and lightweight, which makes it easier for beginners to start developing. The "Laszlo in 10 mins" tutorial is very very nice. You should definately check that out if you're interested into OL development. The only thing you might miss is the wide popularity from Adobe's counterpart product.

If you want to check out OpenLaszlo, the "Getting Started" Website of Laszlo Systems is a good spot to start.

References


This article has been written by Timo Ernst, one of Germanys OpenLaszlo evangelists. Thanks a lot to Timo for providing that valueable content!

]]>Applet or Flex?info@richability.comApplet2008-09-03T14:47:14+02:00http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-11http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-11bar

When heading for Rich Client solutions there are plenty of directions which can be chosen. One direction could be an Applet or Java Web Start solution (difference is explained in the box below), another solution could be a Flex based approach.

Both approaches are based on solid proven Frontend Technologies: Applet technology has been around for a long time and is adopted widely in the market, Flex is not adopted that widely but grows continuously with a large community behind.
Applet and Java Web Start - the small difference:
  • Applets are started via browser, Java Web Start can be launched from the desktop directly
  • Applets sometimes cause headaches due to the Java environment being provided by the browser - a certain JRE might be required by your application
  • Java Web Start enables developers to ship the JRE with their application
  • Java Web Start applications are cached - applets will be always loaded from the scratch
In a nutshell: for "heavy users" the Java Web Start approach might be a valid one, for "light users" an applet could do so

Actually the title of this post "Applet or Flex?" is not correct as we will not start an "Applet versus Flex" comparison here, the title has been chosen to invoke your curiousity. Instead of this versus-comparison we will share our development results of the "employeeManager" application, the core of the application are several database services querying a database. These services we connected to an Adobe Flex frontend on the one hand and a CaptainCasa Applet Frontend on the other hand. We thought it might be interesting to "feel" how two different frontend approaches work with one and the same business logic, and this is exactly what we want to share here. During the next weeks we will create a detailed paper comparing the two technologies in detail, but as a first shot from hip we share the Applet and Flex application. Please refer to the image below to get a high level clue on what has been done.

Simply start playing around with the two applications - the Applet and Flex frontend look pretty similar. You can add and remove employees "by hand" or you can generate a huge number of dummy employees - this enables you to generate 10.000 employees for example and analyze the time required to load these employees.

applet_flex

During the next weeks this mini-app will continue to grow, and we will integrate sophisticated controls such as charting components, drag&drop etc.; then we will be as well able to create a "comparison-sheet" which gives you a detailed overview about the features for each of these frontend technologies. Source can be downloaded as usual at the end of the page, the demo links for entering the application are below...

Hint: the applet demo requires JRE 1.6, Flashplayer 9 is (or higher) is required to run the Flex demo.

applet_demoflex_demo

Download Applet Code import1
Download Flex Code import1

]]>zk - rich client experience, thin client technology!info@richability.comAjax2008-09-17T06:44:59+02:00http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-10http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-10bar

Recently we came across an Ajax framework called "zk", the most interesting point about this framework is the promise that developers would not have to deal with JavaScript when using zk. So we started a little evaluation and we were really impressed about this framework, that's the reason we decided to share the results of our development here in the infospace. Below you will find our "Drag & Shop" application, a web shop demo based on zk and some simple Java services. Source is avaliable below as well...

Framework concepts: the major concept behind the framework is an old one known from UI-frameworks pretty well: a meta definition of the UI is created based on XML (which results in a .zul file), the meta definition will be translated to html when the page is requested by the client. In case the request comes from a browser with a Gecko engine the server will return a .xul page instead of html.

In order to put some business logic to your application there is a simple, but genious concept to do so: Java code can be integrated directly when defining & designing the client part of your application! These Java snippets can be bound to components and events which then will trigger the execution of these snippets at runtime (the snippets are executed on the server, not on the client...). In other words: the nightmare of JavaScript coding used to put some simple functions to the client has come to an end, since this is done by the framework which simply triggers your Java Codet! Btw., developers familar with GWT will know a similar approach since GWT was one of the first frameworks offering Java coding for the client part of the application instead of coding JavaScript - but the GWT control libraries unfortunately are not half as powerful as the zk libraries...

We encourage you to have a detailed look into the zk architecture, the goal of this article is to give you the big picture, for details refer to zk directly.

Development: zk ships with a "lightweight" framework approach, basically the framework is a collection of several jars which need to be tied into your web application. The web.xml needs to be modified in order to forward the .zul requests to the corresponding java classes, but besides these two steps (tie in jars, modify web.xml) no further steps are required. We used eclipse as development environment, but a simple text editor would do as well. Unfortunately there is no WYSIWIG or layout editor for visual designing (now), that's one of the biggest disadvantages when designing zk user interfaces, as you need to do everything based on plain xml coding. A visual editor (Zero Kode) is available, but this editor does not realy behave intuitive, that's the reason we switched back to plain xml coding...

But once you are up to speed with coding, cutting and pasting the xml snippets the develoment of user interfaces is really easy. Since the html output (the "what you get" part) is always regenerated as soon as you access a .zul definition the development is pretty close to WYSIWIG.

UI components: zk contains a really large control library, of course all basic controls for UI development such as Button, Field, Grid, Tree etc. are part of this library. But the really great thing about zk is the way these controls can be combined: most of the controls can embed several other controls, which enables you for example to create a tree-grid-mix control which itself contains checkboxes, buttons etc.. The only limitation for these "control-cobis" is the fantasy and creativity of the developer, but usually you can manage a wide range of UI requirments based on these combinations.

zk-message

Layout controls such as boxes or predefined layouts can be used to arrange the controls within your frontend, from an HTML developers point of view sizing of these layout containers sometimes can be tricky: combining absolute widths and heights with relative ones, for example using a 100% width control in order to shift others to the very left or very right does not really does not work within zk. We recommend to start with predefined zk layouts (BorderLayout, ColumnLayout) before you start creating custom layouts.

An overview of the zk controls can be found here.

Documentation: Documentation can be found on the zk page directly, and the documentation there is a really good starting point. But when you try to implement something which is not one of these "default" scenario it is sometimes a tricky task to find corresponding documentation. As the zk community grows constantly there is hope that this might change soon, but plan some time for googling in case you want to do something fancy based on zk.


Traps & Issues: The whole framework concept is pretty much "straight forward" and you should not have any difficulties to run your first demos. The first time we struggled was when using typed collections in the zk-Java code, this currently does not work. Also make sure to keep track on the Java imports in your .zul file: anything from the "Java-World" used there needs to be imported as you would import in a "normal" Java file as well.

Conclusion: zk really rocks! For a long time we did not evaluate a framework which enables you to create that big results in such a short time. The demo application has been created within one day...and well, we like what has been done there!
zk is framework which pushs Ajax development to the next level. dojo (btw., zk offers integration of 3rd party components such as dojo), scriptaculous & Co are far behind zk, since zk is not "GUI-only" the connection of server side logic is solved in an elegant and easy understandable way.
So if you are heading for a thin client solution we really recommend to have a look into this framework - it might prevent you from weeks of UI engineering, JavaScript debugging an servlet coding...


Our conclusion: a 100% open source solution for implementing cool Ajax apps! And now, get in touch with zk and try our Drag & Shop demo!

dragnshop

get source... import1

]]>Chosing the "best" UI technologyinfo@richability.comAjax2008-10-02T05:53:35+02:00http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-9http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-9infotext_bar

The importance of user interface technologies and frameworks often is underestimated completely . This may result in a successfully delivered application with a top backend but one large problem: lack of acceptance by the users. And lack of acceptance usually results in finger pointing between customer and vendor since the customer blames the development team for having build an application which does not meet their expectations and the development team insists on having implemented all requirements. And quite often this is the end of a relationship between customer and vendor.... There are many things which can be done wrong when deciding for a UI technology and these wrong decisions might cause situations as the situation described above. This article chalks out typical drivers for wrong UI decisions and points out solutions how to sail around these frontend traps.

customer_developer_quarrel

One of the most common reasons for lack of user acceptance is performance. If the application keeps the user busy by showing the sandclock the user will judge the application is not what he expected, even the application mirrors hundred percent the underlying process. Performance is one of the killer arguments which puts blinders on the users eyes - the users will not judge anymore the apllications contents, a performance issue causes users to decline an application completely. A developer might reply: "but take a look at our highly optimized DB querries! It takes about 5ms to execute a query - that's close to world record!"...but the user is not interested in what is going on behind the curtains, he only knows that a table with 500 entries takes about five second until the data finally appears in his browser - and that is too long for him! So what went wrong? One reason could be the devleopment team decided for a UI-framework they knew pretty well from a previous project, but in the previous project they did not deal with large tables, major focus have been forms and fields...so they did not notice the framework always loads table data initially instead of offering partial load or servers side scrolling or something simila. The consequnece: even the backend performs extremely good the frontend keeps breaking the application since table loading and rendering is not the best dicipline of the framework which has been chosen. The situation described here gives us two rules for developers when choosing a UI technology or framework:

1) Knowing a framework good is not enough reason to decide for the framework in a project - especially the tricky requirements need to be covered by the framework! Step through the requirements as early as possible and pick out the ones which are "non default ones" and which might cause loading or rendering issues. Build these tricky requirements and test beyond the borders of the localhost!

2) Never cling to a UI technology just because you know it, keep an open view! Of course it takes time to evaluate a new framework and it takes some time to get up to speed with a new technology - but at the end of a project you will benefit from this time!

The second major reason for lack of acceptance of an application is usability (...one of the most subjective terms in the 21st century...). If a UI-framework is chosen because it provides for a good backend binding and is currently "standard" this not automatically a garant for good UI results and usability. Developers should always get familar with a UI-framework by using the framework in "real-world-scenarios" and not just playing through the always working default examples provided by the framework vendor. This is the only way to prove whether the framework matches the requirements or whether essentials are missing which result in the usage of heavy workarounds. Small workarounds can be accepted, such as using a tree and a list as single controls instead of having a tree-list control, but if you start to fall from one workaround to the next the framework might not be the best choice. Using the framework in order build some screenflows in advance is as well good practice to establish a feeling regarding times required to implement the application. This results in another rule:

3) Evaluate a framework by using the framework! Create some screenflows from the requirements, you will notice pretty fast whether the framework matches or whether you should switch...

Finally it happens quite often that there is not much attention being payed to the user interface part of an application. Developers prefer focusing on the "real important" things of an application which are somewhere in the backend from their point of view...but this is a completely outdated view! The user interface is the only thing of the application directly "in contact" with the user - and the user will decide about an application based on this user interface as this is the only thing he can judge. So there is another rule which is one of the most important ones:

4) Do not underestimate the user interface part of an application! It is the only thing honored by the user - choose a technology which enables you to create magnificent GUIs with a solid backend binding for your requirements and the users will love you! Chose a technology with good backend binding but weak UI results and the users start railing about your application (and you!).

Our conclusion: chosing a UI technology or framework is difficult, the probability to decide for an 70% solution is much bigger than hitting the bullseye. Especially the huge amount of different technologies in the space of UI development is a challenge for every project. That's the reason you either have to stay up to date regarding current UI technologies and frameworks or you have to seek experts advice - richability is a good place to look for both, so keep reading our infospace or simply contact us in case of interest for an UI discovery workshop! ]]>Ajax Shoulder Viewinfo@richability.comAjax2008-10-08T05:49:11+02:00http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-8http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-8infotext_bar

Recently an article has been published by Florian Müller in the German JavaMagazin about the current state of Ajax. In this article Florian summarizes some general thoughts about Ajax and chalks out where Ajax should be used and where not. Unfortunately the article is written in German language but as soon as we have some time "left" we will translate - again, we apologize to all our "Non-German-Readers" (who btw. fortunately have increased a lot!). The article can be viewed as PDF below (simply click the article image) or viewed online at Create or Die.

article]]>Google Stock Traderinfo@richability.comJava & Flex2008-10-09T05:41:17+02:00http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-7http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-7bar

Currently stock trading is pretty hard, there is no day without painful losses and it is really unpredictable where the stocks might go the next few weeks. But there is a high interest in stock trading at the moment as everybody wants to know what is going on with his stocks and whether he sould sell or keep them. In order to know when best selling point has come it is important to be ahead - ahead of other traders who sell their stocks based on 20 minute delayed values. Currently 20 minutes might include a total stock rise or a total stock fall - if the trader does not know he has no chance in the current shark pool.

So we thought even stock trading is not everyones favorite topic at the moment, but there is a HIGH interest, we should create an application which is really useful - of course all our demos such as contact manager, emailmanager etc. are pretty nice demos as well, but in first place showcases and not "real world applications". The stock trader demo we created is an application which is intersting for people who might not be intersted in Rich Client topics as well, as it is a really useful application which helps you to make and save money!

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So what did we do? First of all we took our favorit Rich Client technology (Flex!) and created as messaging enabled application. The UI is kind of listener and as soon as a value drops in the value will be displayed. So far so good. In order to receive real tim courses without delay we created some super smart backend services connecting a Google Finance portfolio - which delivers real time stock values. But they do not provide push mechanism so you keep hanging in front of the browser pressing the F5 key frequently...btw. our chart behaves much more interactively! ;-)

overview

Adding a value to the Google Finance portfolio will cause the value to appear in our application portfolio, so the portfolio is kind of master and we have a view on it. Unfortunately Google Finance provides only real time values for US stocks, European values are not supported yet. As the US market opens up at 15.30 GMT we created a dummy service which will randomly generate values for the time the US markets are closed. This is indicated when entering the application, like this we can ensure you will always see a "dancing graph".

Currently we are not sure how to proceed with this application as it is (from our point of view!) a real killerapp - that's the reason we do not provide the sources for this example, as we possibly try to sell the application. BTW, if you are working for a trading company which is seeking for a webbased real time stock app let us know - as already mentioned, the application is for sale (sales@richability.com)!

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]]>Ajax in Action 2008info@richability.comAjax2008-10-30T05:22:58+01:00http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-6http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-6logo

This week Florian was attending the Ajax in Action conference in Mainz, Germany. He had several sessions & workshops in his "bag" and presented on hot topics within the space of UI development. Florian was one of the "not-only-Ajax-speakers", he was rather presenting on Ajax/Rich Client comparisons and when to use which technology approach. There is an interview with Florian which recently has been released on the conference page, the interview is available here for online reading.

Florian's comment about the conference:

"There is a slight movement in the Ajax UI space. New UI technologies are emerging and it is a tricky task to captivate the audience with 'JavaScript-only' frameworks. Of course the guys behind the frameworks still try to seed the message 'our JS-framework is the best in the world, you can use it for anything...', but usually this does not reflect reality and you can really feel that the audience knows about this. Rich Clients will not be the answer to all questions, the same way Ajax is not the answer to all questions. Both match for different kind of requirments, non of the two approaches is the holy gral for UI development..."

You can download Florian's session slides below. Of course the slides will give more sense in combination with "Live-examples", but maybe you can catch up the message as well based on slides-only...

download slides... import1
]]>Daniel Seiler about zkinfo@richability.comAjax2008-11-03T06:03:41+01:00http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-4http://www.richability.com/index.html#unique-entry-id-4bar_processwide

We were positively surprised to find a session about zk being offered in the conference schedule of the Ajax in Action this year. As there was a slight touch to "JS-only" frameworks within the conference, people were really happy to listen to Daniel Seiler from processwide who offered a nice session about zk. He demonstrated that Ajax frameworks can cover much more than the client part of an application, unfortunately there is no video cut for this session. But we decided to put his slides here, so anyone interested in giving a quick summary to his boss about when and why to use zk can refer to the slides... ;-)


Download slides... import1
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