Thursday 16 October, 2008
Revving up once:radix for RAD Web apps
GUI RAD development moves to the Web
Rodney Gedda 23/07/2008 12:21:42

Once:radix designing a new form
Once:radix designing a new form

Need to do forms development sans Access or Filemaker? Want rapid Web apps without Ruby on Rails? Want a rich Internet interface and abhor Ajax? Need PostgreSQL development, but don't do PHP? Just want a Java application without the, well, Java? Why not check out the once:radix Web-based RAD environment from once:technologies. And, by the way, did I mention it's open source?

It goes by the name of once:radix, a contraction of develop it once and RAD applications for intranets and extranets.

Last year I reported on the release of once:radix as an open source project under the terms of the GPL.

Rob Napier, once:technologies' managing director, was very pleased with the publicity the article generated at the time, and was keen to have a follow-up piece about the technology written.

I suggested a more in-depth review of once:radix and before I knew it I was participating in an online demonstration of the Web-based RAD environment.

Getting started

For the purpose of this review, I simply logged into once:technologies' demonstration server and proceeded to play around with once:radix.

If you want to download and install the application yourself, grab it from Sourceforge and satisfy its minimal dependencies, namely Java, Apache Tomcat and PostgreSQL.

If not, get in touch with once:technologies and request a demo.

Gotta love Firefox

Once:radix is completely Web-based allowing a level of freedom unprecedented in RAD development environments, which have traditionally relied on a fat client.

Ironically, however, once:radix does depend on the Firefox Web browser to function as intended. Yes Firefox is cross-platform, open source and well supported, but wedding an application to one type of browser is not what the Web is all about. If, for some moronic reason, an organization prohibits the use of Firefox, then what?

I spoke with Rob about this and the company is working to multi-browser compatibility and it's simply a matter of time and resources to make it happen.

In addition to this annoying dependency, once:radix is also a bit finicky when it comes to how Firefox is configured.

The default Firefox configuration for signed.applets.codebase_principal_support needs to be set to "true" and the prefs.js configuration file may need to be reset by the browser.

Again, after the demonstration I spoke with Rob about these issues and the company is looking at what can be done to streamline the user experience here.

Comments

once:radix

Rodney Gedda's review provided a fair and balanced analysis of some of the features of once:radix.

The issue of configuring the browser is due to the lock-down of some features in Firefox. But to make some once:radix functions available (e.g. file uploads) signed.applets.codebase_principal_support must be enabled. Alternatively, an SSL signed certificate (e.g. from Verisign) is needed. Both solutions are simple and a matter of choice when developing an application.

The need to delete Rodney's prefs.js file is a problem that occurs infrequently. In fact, it is only the second time I have seen the need to do it, in the many thousands of installations performed. But then, in accordance with Murphy's Law, software is most likely to go wrong during an important product review!

Cross browser support is an important issue. At our last attempt, Internet Explorer was 16 times slower than Firefox 2. With the speed improvements achieved in Firefox 3, the difference would be even more dramatic.

We face the same issues with browser compatibility as other RIA technologies, though it may be more acute with once:radix, due to the sophistication of our client.

We have seen extraordinary changes in all of the associated technologies over the life of this project and expect this will continue. Nevertheless, the rewards far outweigh the small challenges we face. The key platform of our design strategy is to conform to W3C and other standards. If that means, failing to achieve Microsoft compatibility in the short term, so be it. However we are in discussion with Microsoft to develop a strategy to achieve full compatibility without loss of performance. Hopefully, this will be resolved soon.

 

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