Bumble Machine

On May 22, 2007, I read an article, jSeamless - UI Abstraction for Java, by Matthew Hicks, on TheServerSide.com that mentioned jSeamless 1.0 Beta 3 was available for download.  I had not been following these types of technologies, but the concept sounded extremely interesting to me.  As a former thick client developer, I thought the concept of developing an application without dealing with the mess of fusing HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and whatever backend I was dealing with at the moment, was very enticing.  As mentioned by Matthew Hicks, to also be able “develop your UI once and then deploy it as a web application and/or a desktop application without writing any additional code” got me very interested. 

With such a great introduction, I couldn’t help but immmediately head over to http://www.jseamless.org.  Unfortunately, it appeared that others had also read the article and the site was not accessible, I recieved a connection timeout every time I tried to reach the site. I could not contain my excitement though.  I started reading what other people had to say about jSeamless and I noticed a framework called Echo2 was frequently referenced.  Since I couldn’t see what jSeamless was all about, I quickly headed over to http://www.nextapp.com/platform/echo2/echo/. 

 While Echo2 did not offer the ability to deploy my application as something other than a web application, Echo2 does claim to “[remove] the developer from having to think in terms of ‘page-based’ applications and enables him/her to develop applications using the conventional object-oriented and event-driven paradigm for user interface development.” I thought this is what I am looking for, but I had my doubts as to it ability to deliver on this claim.  After taking a look at the demos on the site and doing some additional web search for tutorials using Echo2, I decided to try it out for myself.

For my first application, I decided to implement a simple single player Blackjack game.  The results, found at http://www.kriggio.com/EchoBlackjack, were great.  Within a few hours, I was able to get a simple Blackjack game working.  For my first experience, I was greatly impressed.

I am definitely going to play around with Echo2 some more, yet I am now even more curious how frameworks like jSeamless compare.

I was able to quickly get started using Echo2 thanks to Deitrich Kappe’s Tutorial, Ajax with Echo2 and Eclipse, located at http://www.pathf.com/echo2/Echo2-Part1.pdf.

For reference, I placed a zipped version of my code at http://www.kriggio.com/EchoBlackjack/EchoBlackjack.zip