Optaros Labs

Open Source Java Toolkit for RIAs – Pivot

In this video from a webinar session with Optaros, Greg Brown and Todd Volkert explain and demonstrate Pivot Tookit, a Java framework for building Rich Internet Applications.

The audio is a bit noisy for the first 3 minutes or so but cleans up after that. To really see the code samples you’ll likely need to be at full screen, or download the high resolution mpg from Blip.tv.

Presenters:
Greg Brown is a senior member of the technical staff at VMware. He has been working with and evangelizing rich client-enabling technologies for over 10 years, including Java, Flash, Flex, and AJAX. He is the architect and lead developer of Pivot, a Java-based rich client platform. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Systems Engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Todd Volkert is a senior engineer at VMware. He has been designing and building professional web applications for 12 years, leveraging both server-side and client-side technologies, and is the co-developer of Pivot. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley.

What is Pivot?

Pivot is an open-source platform for building rich internet applications in Java. It combines the enhanced productivity and usability features of a modern RIA toolkit with the robustness of the industry-standard Java platform.

Pivot applications are written using a combination of Java and XML and can be run either as an applet or as a standalone (optionally offline) desktop application. While Pivot was designed to be familiar to web developers who have experience building AJAX applications using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, it provides a much richer set of standard widgets than HTML, and allows developers to create sophisticated user experiences much more quickly and easily. Pivot will also seem familiar to Swing developers, as both Swing and Pivot are based on Java2D and employ a model-view-controller (MVC) architecture to separate component data from presentation. However, Pivot includes additional features that make building modern GUI applications much easier, including declarative UI, data binding, effects and transitions, and web services integration.

Pivot version 1.0 has recently been released. Its creators would like to introduce Pivot to Optaros to help increase developer awareness of and interest in the platform.

Tags: ajax, java, open source, optaros, pivot, ria, toolkit, webinar

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