Bernhard Wagner

You can never be too rich or too thin. That's what Wally Simpson might have quipped to her stock trading application had she lived to enjoy the blessings of the Internet. Indeed, Wally may have had a point there: today's mainstream approaches to end-user computing are lacking. Fat clients are difficult to distribute and HTML is inadequate for high-end GUIs. A client that is both rich and thin would be the ideal solution. Rich Thin Clients Java is a great platform for rich thin clients (RTCs). The availability of JREs on both the client and server is a formidable basis for an RTC library. Given standard Java infrastructure, such a library can offer server-side peer objects for widgets and a presentation engine executing the GUI for any number of applications, as shown in Figure 1. This library will be lean and mean because it can: Delegate event handling and graphics... (more)