Building Rich-Client-Like Web Apps With Echo

An anonymous reader writes: "IBM developerWorks is running a feature on the 'Echo' project, which is used for creating web apps that 'look and act like rich clients.' Echo uses HTML and JavaScript to render a user-interface in the browser instead of client-side plugins like Java WebStart. The API is similar to that of Swing. The article examines an example email client written with the technology. The framework itself is built on Java servlets, and is distributed under the LGPL. More examples can be found here."

Comments

This is dumb

[Curien]

Ooh! Look! I can put every application known to man in a web browser!

Web browsers are turning into the Emacs of desktop computing, and it's pissing me off. If you want a front-end, write a front-end, possibly in Java. When you need to communicate with the server, open a friggin socket. Or use XWT or some other XML-RPC-based solution.

Oooh! But it's web-based! Fscking marketroids.

Gain, less pain

[redtail1]

Good article. Richer GUIs for web apps without the pain of applets seems like a good idea to this neophyte.

I'll probably give it a shot if I can ever talk myself into playing with compilers again. Scripting languages like PHP are hard to give up...

Inefficient and Slow

[slashkitty]

I found this to be the worst web development ever. Using javascript to instead of regular links makes it slower and messier. Just because the application may be a little easier to write doesn't make it a good idea. In the email example, the login form submit uses javascript. The link to view the email uses javascript and reloads both frames, very inefficient. It also seem to do multiple submits/redirects just to load one page. One could have just used to highlight the table row, instead of reloading the entire window. Not only that, but the app doesn't even work in Mozilla for me!!