From: Sally Khudairi <[email protected]>
Subject: [announce] The ASF Asks: Have you met Apache Pivot?
To: [email protected]
Date: Wednesday, July 14, 2010, 9:03 AM
The all-volunteer Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
develops, stewards, and incubates nearly 150 Open Source
projects and initiatives, many of which power
mission-critical applications in financial services,
aerospace, publishing, government, healthcare, research,
infrastructure, and more.
Did you know that 50% of the Top 10 downloaded Open Source
products are Apache projects?
Did you know that most Enterprise Java solutions are built
using Apache?
We are pleased to showcase Apache Pivot, the full-featured,
professional-grade Java development platform for Rich
Internet Applications (RIAs).
Quick peek: RIAs are distributed Web applications that are
delivered via site-specific browsers, plug-ins, sandboxes,
or virtual machines. Apache Pivot provides a foundation upon
which sophisticated and engaging applications can be easily
built and deployed over the Web. Pivot combines the enhanced
productivity and usability features of a modern RIA toolkit
with the robustness of the industry-standard Java platform,
leveraging its comprehensive feature set and extensive
industry support.
Background: initially developed at VMWare, Pivot was
accepted into the Apache Incubator in January 2009 and
graduated as an Apache Top-Level Project in December 2009.
Why Pivot: Like other RIA platforms, Pivot includes
features that make building modern GUI applications easier,
including:
- An XML-based markup language for declaring the structure
of a user interface
- Stylable themes (aka "skins")
- Data binding
- Animated effects and transitions
- Web Services integration
Pivot is the only RIA framework that allows developers to
build applications for the Java plugin using Java or any
other JVM-compatible language, such as JavaScript, Groovy,
or Scala. Pivot is also the only truly open RIA framework:
it is completely Open Source, and is driven entirely by the
software development community.
Pivot allows developers to build applications using
languages, tools, and APIs they already know, reducing
technology sprawl and streamlining solution techonlogy
stacks.
What's under the hood: Pivot 1.5 improves the overall
application development experience through
- Expanded Data binding across a much larger collection of
components and properties, as well as BindType enum to allow
a caller to control the bind direction (load, store, or
both).
- New Pub/Sub (publish/subscribe) API to facilitate
decoupled messaging within a Pivot application.
- New SuggestionPopup component to simplify the task of
adding "auto-complete" or "lookup" functionality to a
TextInput and to provide "combo box"-like behavior in an
application.
- Overhauled Form improvements, including more prominent
flagged fields and flag icons more consistent with the
overall Pivot look and feel.
- Improved Text rendering by Pivot components to be
consistent with natively rendered text.
- Improved Bindable interface that simplifies WTKX and Java
code integration, including a Resources argument to the
initialize() method to provide the caller with access to the
resource bundle used to load the WTKX file.
- Enhanced look and feel such as tab and Push button-like
components (PushButton, ListButton, CalendarButton, etc.)
with slightly rounded corners and bevel consistency.
- Streamlined QueryServlet API which is more consistent
with Web query client API, making it easier to write Pivot
applications that provide and take advantage of REST-based
Web Services.
- New ResultList class (org.apache.pivot.sql.ResultList)
added to simplify the task of returning JDBC result data
from a Web query, and to transform SQL a result set into a
JSON or CSV response without the need for any intermediary
transformation (the data is transformed on the fly as it is
read from the database).
- New FileSerializer to simplify the task of writing file
upload applications in Pivot.
Latest release: Apache Pivot 1.5 on 4 June 2010 under the
Apache License v.2.0.
Downloads, documentation, examples, and more information:
visit http://pivot.apache.org/ .
# # #
