Eclipse Plug-in for Visual Drag-and-Drop Style Development of Backbase Front-Ends

Subject / Master of Science Thesis Assignment
Period / October 2005 – July 2006
Location / Backbase (Amsterdam)
Supervisor / Mark Schiefelbein, Arie van Deursen

Description

Although DHTML technology has been around for some years, Google’s new web applications (Google Suggest and Google Maps) have boosted the awareness of a model based on DHTML, AJAX and W3C standards for creating Rich Internet Applications. The Backbase Presentation Client (BPC) is an AJAX engine based entirely on AJAX technology, and differentiates itself via a generic User Interface declaration language (BXML). BXML is a XML application that also includes many XSLT and XPath functions. BXML is interpreted by the AJAX engine, and translated to native DOM commands in the browser. The Backbase AJAX Engine is developed in JavaScript, and it works in Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Firefox and soon also in Opera and Safari. It does not require any type of plug-in, which differentiates Backbase from other RIA vendors.

Backbase rich clients can be easily combined with Java & J2EE, .NET & ASP.NET, XML, XSLT and XPath. The J2EE Server Edition is currently under development and will provide client-server connectivity between the Backbase Presentation Client and any J2EE back-up. Backbase achieves this by providing a client / server synchronization layer on top of JSF. The layer is based on server-side controls that act as ‘proxies’ for Backbase Ajax controls on the client.

The topic of this project is to build an Eclipse Plug-in that will be used by developers to visually create Backbase front-ends (see below a screenshot of a comparable solution based on Microsoft Visual Studio). The following requirements will need to be implemented to provide a user-friendly development environment:

·  Use wizards to easily create a project, the startup JSP and the subview JSPs

·  Choose controls from a toolbox, drag them onto a canvas

·  Set the properties and events using user friendly property editors (date pickers, color pickers etc.)

·  Set style properties (size, color, etc.) directly in the design view

·  Test the design view in an embedded browser

·  Link into the server-side by linking the controls to JSF server-side components

·  Hook into the Java code step-by-step debugger

Tasks:

·  Investigate Eclipse Plug-in Technology

·  Choose technology for visual development within Eclipse

·  Implement Plug-in

Information

For further information please contact:

·  Mark Schiefelbein, Backbase,

·  Arie van Deursen