Simplified Development of Web Applications with armidale

Shayne R Flint, Department of Computer Science, Australian National University, Canberra, 0200. Email: shayne@cs.anu.edu.au

Dr Clive Boughton, Department of Computer Science, Australian National University, Canberra, 0200. Email: clive@cs.anu.edu.au

Keywords

armidale, www, distributed computing, java, capability dynamics

Abstract

The World Wide Web is increasingly being used, across all sectors of the Information Technology industry, to host distributed interactive applications. Many of these applications are built using a combination of different, and sometimes inappropriate, technologies. Often the final products are complex, and the associated likelihood of increased development, integration, deployment and maintenance problems lead to high overall lifecycle costs.

This paper outlines the requirements, design, implementation and testing of armidale, a set of open source programs and libraries designed to radically simplify the development, deployment and use of web applications that have rich graphical user interfaces. Armidale applications are developed, using conventional programming techniques and the armidale API, as if they were stand-alone programs. These programs can then be run on stand-alone computers or on an armidale server. When running on a server, armidale applications display their GUI on client computers across the internet (or intranet). A high level, light weight message protocol between the server and its clients ensures that armidale applications respond well to user interaction.