Initial release of UIDL now available for download!

[Dominic]

Hi all,

as indicated in a previous post, I'm in the process of developing a
kind of universal client which allows for the display of rich user
interfaces (http://www.uidl.net). This client includes a Rhino
JavaScript interpreter and downloads scripts containing the UI code
from a server (as per HTML for a browser but for complex UIs).

The main features of a UIDL page are the ability to create complex
user interfaces (using Swing based widgets) and to communicate
asynchronously with server based objects (using the JSON-RPC
protocol).

Whilst this may sound similar to AJAX, the implementation is much
cleaner thanks to the ability to natively instantiate complex UI
components within the browser and the ability to transparently present
server based objects via their JavaScript proxies.

The motivation for this project comes from the realisation that the
(HTML) browser model was developed for document presentation rather
than as a GUI for complex applications. Most web application
developers revert to hacks and are required to have knowledge of many
different technologies (JavaScript, HTML, ASP, SQL, etc). Web
applications are generally less user friendly than a comparable
client-
server application of the 1980's and the code is much more difficult
to maintain (although web applications are easier to deploy).

On the other hand, the browser (or universal client) model is vastly
superior in that it makes it easy to deploy application upgrades in a
central location without needing to worry about upgrading clients. The
proposal is therefore to extend the browser model to include support
for a rich library of UI components and to asynchronously and
transparently update client data structures from objects located on
the server.

The initial release is now available for download at the Google code
site:

http://code.google.com/p/uidl/

Please have a look and give me some feedback.

Regards,
Dominic.