Investigations into RAD RIA tools
As I continue developing ajax dashboards for client sites, and inheriting code that looks so cookie cutter that I can’t believe it was done by hand, I’ve gotten the feeling that there are some killer tools out there that I don’t have in my arsenal yet. So I’ve begun a hunt for the best RAD RIA toolset.
So far the tool that strikes me as the most impressive is TIBCO’s General Interface. It was recently forked over to DOJO, and can be found for DL at http://generalinterface.org .
My first impressions are that this tool can really speed up my life if I can digest the way it does things. It is completely written in its own api library, yes that’s right a javascript visual gui ide written in javascript. Sweet, and it seems to be very mature. It has been around since 2001, mostly being used in the financial sector. It doesn’t seem to care much about the back-end as long as we are dealing with webservices, so Java/DotNet/Php all seem to be usable if they can deliver soap or json.
I’ve even seen some nice tutorials on wrapping other ajax libraries so they can be used in the GI Builder environment. And it looks so nice. Everything is getting stored as serialized prototypes so they can be reused in future js projects. Now I’m going to dig some more and see If I can create a sample app and link it to DotNet. In the meantime one fun example I have found is http://craigslist.remixedby.us which tries to organize craigslist in a GI app.
More to come..