Digital Magpie

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Retargetable User Interfaces

This via Cafe au Lait: the Abstract User Interface Markup Language which, according to IBM, lets you design a UI once and then deploy it as either a thin client via a servlet based rendering engine, or as a thick client via a Swing based UI (why not SWT one may ask). This sounds a lot like the functionality that Next/Apple have had for years with Web Objects. Personally, I’m not too sure about the whole idea, I think that if you’re designing an essentially forms-based application then thin clients are fine, anything else really needs a real user interface (read: thick client). Any tool which tries to build both from a single description is going to either create a way too complicated and slow web experience or a dismally poor client application.