I want no monuments

Following two posts on the echo2 forums, Matt Brooks has written a nice review about his experience using a stack made of Echo2, JBoss, EJB3 and ServiceMix ESB.

Matt’s app seems really cool. Its loading page is the cooooooolest thing ever seen so far in the ajax multiverse!

Taken from the architectural point of view, it’s a nice reading especially because I’ve heard too many “w00t!”s while I’m not aware of any good enterprise application (but Google’s, of course).

I haven’t looked for them actually, but I think I should have heard of them, at least from the javaposse guys, who are well aware of RIAs (as one of them is from Google and as they’ve interviewed the GWT team).

Am I wrong? Or blind? Or this ajax plane is actually taking too much time to take off?

By the way, even my two apps are going to be released in the next few months. But they won’t be public. Argh! I wanna go public!

On December, the 5th, I’ll have my very first public speech!! I’m very excited about that. I’m even worried, actually.

I’ve just completed a draft of the slide show. Although a very busy period, I’ll hope to have time to add some more info about the projects related to Echo2 such as HSE, the Extras and EchoPointNG.

So: do you have a dinner planned for the 5th of December? No? Do you want to learn something more about JSF (by Michele Sciabarrà) and Echo2? Do you like pizza? :)

Hurry up! Get the details!

Echo2 is a wonderful graphical toolkit that lets you create web applications giving them the look of the traditional desktop ones. Its API is very similar to the Swing one: indeed you can consider it a web-oriented subset of Swing.

I was told (that’s an italian programmer’s experience) that the customer will never see nor understand the difference between a desktop application and your Echo2 + Tomcat + browser combo (his customer believes that’s Visual Basic).

The system requirements are the only someway negative aspect of Echo: you will need at least Firefox from version 1.0 or Internet Explorer version 6. Anyway, if your customers run IE6 they won’t ever enjoy some graphical features because the browser is not capable of rendering them. PNG transparency in particular. IE7 seems to render PNG correctly (finally!). Check it using Browsershots.

The first thing you need is the Echo2 framework itself. The upcoming version 2.1.0 has introduced many improvements and it is the base for the Echo2 Extras package. The main classes of the Extras package are the menu bar pane, the accordion pane and the tab pane.

The community has then release EchoPoingNG, a set of additional components (mainly extensions of the official ones) with many interesting features. The drop down calendar is my favourite!

If you run Gentoo, I’ve just submitted three ebuilds for:

• Echo2 version 2.1.0_beta5
• Echo2 Extras version 0.3
• EchoPointNG version 2.1.0_rc3

Check them out!