Hi all,

   the initial release of a new open source project, UIDL, has just been
released through Google code, at http://code.google.com/p/uidl/.

UIDL is an acronym for User Interface Description Language. The goal of the
project is to create support for a universal client which allows for the
display of rich user interfaces. This client includes a Rhino JavaScript
interpreter and downloads scripts containing the UI code from a server (as
per HTML for a browser but for complex UIs).

The main features of a UIDL page are the ability to create complex  user
interfaces (using Swing based widgets) and to communicate asynchronously
with server based objects (using the JSON-RPC  protocol).

Whilst this may sound similar to AJAX, the implementation is much  cleaner
thanks to the ability to natively instantiate complex UI components within
the browser and the ability to transparently present  server based objects
via their JavaScript proxies.

The motivation for this project comes from the realisation that the (HTML)
browser model was developed for document presentation rather than as a GUI
for complex applications. Web  applications are generally less user friendly
than a comparable fat client application and the code is much more difficult
to maintain (although web applications are easier to deploy).

On the other hand, the browser (or universal client) model is vastly
superior in that it makes it easy to deploy application upgrades in a
central location without needing to worry about upgrading clients. The
proposal is therefore to extend the browser model to include support for a
rich library of UI components and to asynchronously and transparently update
client data structures from objects located on  the server.

The initial release is now available for download at the Google code site:

http://code.google.com/p/uidl/

More information about the UIDL project is available at:

http://www.uidl.net/

Regards,
Dominic.