Vocês se recordam do Marc Fleury? Fleury, 39 anos, é o criador do servidor de aplicações JBoss. Pois bem, depois que a Red Hat adquiriu a empresa que Fleury fundou, ele se tornou VP e Gerente Geral da divisão JBoss/Red Hat. Pouco tempo depois (Março, 2007), ele saiu da Red Hat para, supostamente, se dedicar a família e outros hobbies.

Alguns dias atrás (12 Dez'07), Fleury entrou para o Advisory Board da Appcelerator, uma start-up baseada em Atlanta-GA, cidade em que ele mora.

O lema da companhia é "More App. Less Code". Mas o que é e o que faz a Appcelerator?

Appcelerator is an open source software company providing products and solutions for enterprise rich Internet application (RIA) and SOA-based services development. The Appcelerator Platform combines the best of RIA and SOA-based technologies and design principles into one integrated, open and standards-based platform. The result is a fundamentally new - and much faster - way to build Web-based applications with more functionality and less code.

E o produto (open-source!):

• Message Oriented Architecture: significa que todo "comportamento" de uma Appcelerator application é governada por messagens leves
  
• AJAX and DHTML without Javascript: apenas standard HTML é utilizado; JavaScript não é exigido
  
• SOA-based services in ANY language: Java, Ruby, PHP ou .NET. Serviços Appcelerators podem ser acessados por qualquer RIA Appcelelator ou não (desde que sejam REST-based)
  
• Universal Clients: RIAs Appcelerator podem ser utilizadas com IE, Firefox, Safari e Opera
  
• Rapid Prototypes - No Throwaway Code: como é baseado em mensagens, você pode, rapidamente, criar RIAs sem escrever um linha de código no lado do servidor.
  
• Platform Extensibility: Appcelerator é uma plataforma que pode ser expandida para necessidades específicas e até mesmo criar serviços em uma linguagem não suportada pela versão atual da plataforma
  

Mais um na Guerra dos RIAs: Mozilla Prism

Imagine você abrindo seu Google Calendar direto no seu desktop. Melhor, imagine você abrindo qualquer aplicação que possa ser executada em um Web browser como se fosse uma aplicação típica do seu computador. Pois bem, o Projeto Prim (prisma), da fundação Mozilla (Mozilla Labs), irá tornar isto uma realidade.

O Prism seria a evolução do Webrunner (se você clicar neste link será direcionado para o Wiki do Prims). Ainda é uma versão de testes (beta), mas já existe uma versão experimental para Windows, Mac e Linux .

Instalei no meu Mac. O Prism criou um atalho no meu desktop...



...e pude, por exemplo, acessar algumas aplicações Web no seu computador. Abaixo a página principal dos meus documentos no Google Docs:



O Prism se propõe a unir o melhor dois dois mundos: toda interatividade proporcionada por uma aplicação no seu desktop, feita para o mundo Web.

As possibilidades são infinitas: construir uma aplicação para a Web e executá-la no seu PC/Mac?! Fantástico. O NY Times e o site da Info tem tanbém algumas informações interessantes sobre o Prism.

Eclipse Libera 1a. Plataforma AJAX baseada em OSGi

Eclipse Foundation liberou nesta Seg, 15/Out/2007, o release 1.0 do Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) . Leia aqui o press-release.

Segundo esta nota do Java Developer's Journal:
- RAP 1.0 é a primeira plataforma AJAX, baseado no standard OSGi, que permite a criação de aplicações RIA com o Eclipse

- OSGi é um ambiente "service-oriented, component-based" que promove a interoperabilidade de aplicações e serviços. Empresas que irão utilizar o RAP serão capazes de criar aplicações AJAX/RIA que são componente-based e integra-las aos sistemas corporativos.

Mais sobre OSGi direto da Wikipedia:


Definição:

The Framework implements a complete and dynamic component model - something that is missing in standalone Java/VM environments. Applications or components (coming in the form of bundles for deployment) can be remotely installed, started, stopped, updated and uninstalled without requiring a reboot - management of Java packages/classes is specified in great detail. Life cycle management is done via APIs which allow for remote downloading of management policies. The service registry allows bundles to detect the addition of new services, or the removal of services, and adapt accordingly.

RIA versus JSF?

To be correct, the article's tittle is "RIA renaissance versus JSF dark ages?", from SearchWebServices.com. In this post I just want to write some excerpts:

- "Developers have a choice of tools and technologies for RIA, including Flash from Adobe Systems Inc. and the more generic Ajax, and they can even mix and match as best suits individual projects, he said during a Burton telebriefing on Tuesday. But they need to beware of tools and technologies that are inflexible. The theme of the briefing, "Build for Today, Architect for Tomorrow," was that architects and developers should select technologies and approaches to today's projects that are flexible, agile and not too complex, so that today's application can be modified to fit future needs."

- "Our confidence is pretty weak in JSF in general because we continue to get feedback from customers saying that the platform's too complicated..."

- "...Using Web frameworks like Shale and JSF and Struts to do RIA works, but it's inflexible. Because your interface is being generated rather than being coded, you don't have as much flexibility on how it's presented..."

- "What we're talking about is not Java in general, but a particular aspect of Java, which is the Java enterprise edition and that we do believe is overly complex to the point where it actually hinders productivity."

- "You can use them in combination. Many times we find that Ajax is the most powerful solution especially for enhancing existing Web apps, taking existing Web sites and adding some graphical capabilities to them. But sometimes it falls short and Flash or Java applets might be a better choice."

I completely agree.

RIA and SOA

I am investigating the advantages of RIA (Rich Internet Application) over the traditional Client/Web interfaces. In this article, Duane Nickul, Senior Technical Evangelist at Adobe, puts some light in this discussion.

Lest start with a traditional SOA stack:

Since a human being lives in the world above the service consumer,
the service itself will not necessarily care or be aware that a human is there. However, it is highly likely that humans are part of a service call and exist as either the trigger of some event that results in a service call and/or are the ultimate
consumers of the service result themselves. While contradictory to the title
of this article, one could state that humans are not directly part of SOA any
more than business processes are. However, both business processes and
humans utilize the SOA infrastructure.
To architect such interactions, architects should take great care to abstract any details of the service itself away from the human. The human should view the
"V" (view) component of MVC and not care about the "C" or "M" components. Accordingly, architects need a mechanism to present consistent views to the human that are abstract of any dependency upon the service.

Client-server Approaches:

1. Traditional Approach

2. AJAX, Flex mode for RIAs (new approach)

3. Final Considerations

In the Flex example shown, web services are used to communicate interactively
with the services at the bottom. Note that the cardinality is not limited in any
way to 1:1. A Flex or AJAX application may communicate directly with multiple
services, then abstract all the complexity of SOA and present the view and some
control components to the human being above the client side.
Several recent examples of the model for RIAs to interact between humans and services can be seen all over the Internet. Some applications like Apple iTunes have viewer panes which are generated locally on the client machine—such as the user's music library (see Figure 4). When they switch panes to view the iTunes Music Store, they connect directly to the Apple iTunes Music Store service, retrieve a result set, and then present it to the human being (see Figure 5). To the human being, the end result is a seamless experience joining both service calls and local
processing into one application