Open source Jspresso serves multi-channel RIA

An Ajax application developed with Jspresso

After more than a year of development the open source Jspresso project has released version 3.5 which promises to streamline rich Internet application development for Flash, Ajax and Swing interfaces.

Jspresso began in 2005 as a project to develop a new framework for building Web-based business applications with desktop-like interfaces. It was released as an open source project in 2008.

Jspresso promises seamless “multi-channel deployment” of the front-end where one application can be deployed with Flash, Ajax (qooxdoo & WingS) and Swing.

It achieves this through “views” which are generated at runtime depending on the chosen deployment method. The developer gets a RIA, but does not need to code Swing, Flex, JavaScript or HTML.

The 3.5 release introduces the qooxdoo framework as a new Ajax UI channel (existing Jspresso apps need to be recompiled), a new Eclipse plug-in to support syntax colouring and code completion (based on the Groovy Eclipse plug-in).

Jspresso development requires a Java development kit (JDK 6+), the Apache Maven project management tool, rhe Eclipse IDE for Java EE and the Apache Tomcat servlet container (at least version 6.0). The architecture is similar to Vaadin, another open source project.

The Jspresso framework uses SJS (Sugar for Jspresso), a Groovy-based domain specific language (DSL) that acts like an abstraction to Spring XML.

“The source code is more compact yet more humanly readable, since it hides most of the Jspresso internals,” according to the developers.

“However, SJS does not weaken Jspresso power, or its expressivity, since you can always fall back to Spring XML authoring whenever required.”

Other new features in version 3.5 are new property types and their UI support, Flash charting integration, and more documentation.

Its developers say Jspresso is production ready and doesn't require a J2EE application server or a “high cost” database server and Jspresso powered applications have been in production on the Apache Tomcat-MySQL stack.

Jspresso is available for free under the LGPL license.

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