Products - Technology in a Nutshell

What are the key ideas behind the product line "Casabac GUI Server"?

• One development - multiple GUI Clients: define the user interface once, define the server-side application once - and enable multiple client platforms to run with the user interface.
   
• Web Interactivity: Casabac's Web Client is as interactive as native rich clients, though running in a plain browser environment without plug-ins.
   
• Rich Control Library: Casabac comes with an extensive library offering controls for all various aspects of business applications.
   
• Simple and efficient Development: Minimum knowledge is required: "just Java" is enough! You do not need to know HTML, CSS, Struts, JSP, etc.! The development result is clearly structured and easy to maintain. Running in a standard J2EE environment it can be bound to any server-side logic. Internationalization aspects (multi-language, multiple formats for date, time, ...) is built in.

One Development - multiple GUI Clients

The concept is quite simple: define your GUI layouts once, define your server-side logic once - and have multiple client platforms to run with the User Interface.

Advantage: no need not to split development resources into a "Web GUI Development" and a "Native GUI Development" effort. Just have one GUI development effort left.

Web Interactivity

Are your customer users disappointed using web applications because of the insufficient performance level? Are they frustrated and impatient to see constantly screens being reloaded every time they initiate some server interaction? Then make them pleasantly surprised by implementing the Casabac Web Client: the interactivity of pages is comparable with native GUI client implementations - offering stable, non-flickering pages and highly interactive controls:

Unlike classical Web implementations Casabac's Web pages stay stable during operation. Only "data behind the page" is exchanged between client and server. This approach results in an additional advantage that there is a significant reduction of data volume being transferred forth and back between client and server.

Extensive Control Library

Casabac GUI Server control library is extremely rich and offers following functions/features:

• Data Input / Output

  • field

  • field with flexible value help

  • date input, time input, color selection

  • checkbox, radio button, multi line text input, select box

  • fix combo box, dynamic combo box

  • text output, image output

  • button, button with image, icon

• Grids / Trees

  • tree, tree with additional columns

  • textgrid

  • control grid in which any Data Input/Output controls can be placed

  • sizable columns

  • sorting of column data

  • drag & drop in tree

• Containers

  • header, footer, body, titlebar

  • Titled areas, non-titled areas

  •  different types of tabbed areas

• Reporting

  • report sheet containing lists, images, text

  • JPEG and SVG business charts

  • both HTML and PDF rendering

  • PDF print document generation

• Modularization

  • Page in page

  • Frame arrangement of pages

• Others

  • Timer

  • Hot-key usage

The control library is open and can be easily extended.

Simple and efficient Development

The development is simple and follows the commonly accepted paradigm of abstracting layout design as much as possible from code implementation behind the layout:

• A layout is defined as XML String - containing all the controls with their attributes.
• Behind the layout there is one Java class (so called "adapter class") that represents the "logic of the page".

All the rest is up to Casabac: building the HTML page for the Web client, binding a running user interface client to the server side adapter, etc.

All a developer need to know is "Java" in order to build professional user interfaces.