• Date: March 22nd 2005
• Location: Atrium Seminars, Hof ter Vleestdreef, 1070 Brussel
• Price: Free for BeJUG members and JavaPolis attendees, 200 Euro for non-members.
• Registration: Send email to events@bejug.org?subject=Rich User Interface Seminar 2005

Most of us are used to work with Java on the server side and ignored or neglected Java at the client side. A lot happened in the last few years to make development for the client side in Java more appealing and to make the user interfaces more attractive.

The XUL frameworks play an important role to make the developer's and graphical designer's life a lot easier. XUL, which stands for XML User interface Language, was brought to everybody's attention in the late nineties when it was introduced with the Mozilla browser. Since then a lot of Java implementations of XML-based User interface Languages appeared, of which JellySwing, Thinlet, XUI and SwingML are the best known. To make life even easiers, some of the above frameworks even allow you to define the style in a seperate file, just as CSS does for HTML. There is only one bad thing about these frameworks, they are not interoperable, there is no universal accepted standard for XUL as there is for HTML or XHTML for example. You can not reuse the XML you wrote for one of the frameworks with another framework, they all define their own XML User interface Language.

The most heard complaint about client side applications in Java is that they are so ugly. This is one of the biggest misconceptions about Swing! The only problem is that it takes a lot of effort to make a good look and feel for Java applications. To make life easier, on javatoo.com you can find look and feels that you can easily incorporate in your own applications. Applications build with the look and feel of JGoodies or Skin Look And Feel look a lot better than when you use the standard look and feel!

Another approach is to build rich internet applications by taking advantage of the fact that a lot of people have the Flash plugin installed in their browser and that SWF can be dynamically generated on the server side by tools like OpenLaszlo or by using Flex. Both make use of XML based User interface Language, but here the XML is generated or written on the server side and compiled and send to the client to be executed by the Flash plugin in the browser.

Last but not least, there are new efforts like JDIC, which can be used to access native compontents (access to the browser, the tray, etc...) from within Java applications, and JDNC, which provides richer components, a higher level API and a XML User interface Language. These can greatly simplify development of Java desktop clients.

In this workshop, we will try to show the latest innovations in the above areas.