Rich UI and I (and i)

JoePluta — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 17:25:06 GMT

Hello there! It's been a very hectic few weeks here with lots of projects (some of which I can tell you about, some of which I can't... yet). I haven't been able to post as much as I had liked but I hope to be able to fix that over the coming months. I especially hope to give you some updates regarding the Rich UI and how that particular code works with the i.

To start with, I've managed to create end-to-end rich applications using nothing but the Rational tooling. These applications run from a Rich client in the browser written using the latest RUI release, through a web service written in EGL using RBD 7.1, to an RPG program written using RDi 7.1. It's fast and easy - the entire web service infrastructure, for example, only took a dozen or so lines. I'm looking forward to the day when all three components live together in a single workbench, but for now it's pretty easy. In fact, I run all three tools on my desktop at the same time in less than 1GB of memory (my Firefox and Thunderbird take up more!).

I've begun playing with the various widgets, including the Dojo widgets. I created a simple application that invokes a web service to get data and then shows that data side-by-side using a regular Grid object and a DojoGrid. I'm finding some interesting things about developing, including issues with the debugger and with passing complex objects (remind me to explain why you can't create a factory function that returns a DojoGrid).

All in all, it's been very interesting. Unfortunately, the real projects are taking most of my time, so I don't have a lot to share publicly this post, but I hope to be able to tell you more about some of those projects soon. And in the meantime, I'll try to keep updating you with what I've been up to. I see if I can figure out how to post my end-to-end HelloWorld application later this week.

Thanks as always for reading!

EGL and i

Rich UI and I (and i)