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Visual WebGui Has Window to AJAX


Israeli company attempts to simplify AJAX development


Jeff Feinman
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February 15, 2008 —  An Israeli startup, Visual WebGui, has launched a namesake AJAX tool that the company says will unleash desktop development without the need to master the underlying Web technologies.

The application development and deployment tool targets users familiar with Windows Forms.  “All the Visual Studio or Windows Forms documentation is basically the same for WebGui,” said Navot Peled, CEO of the Tel Aviv-based company founded in July 2007. “Therefore, there is nothing new to learn.”


Solving the setbacks
Peled explained that he and his son, Guy Peled, the company’s CTO, created the Visual WebGui tool “out of frustration,” as they tried to overcome development setbacks and the complexities associated with AJAX, by giving developers a rapid application development tool.

The Microsoft-only product can be used on the .NET Framework. It is installed locally and enables Windows-like desktop development. According to Peled, it offers optimized communication between the server and the client, and is the only framework that lets developers work as if they’re using a full-blown desktop application without having to master the Web technologies.

Peled believes that the framework’s empty client addresses at least one shortcoming he sees in AJAX: the ability of attackers to modify code running on the client.

Jeffrey Hammond, a senior analyst with Forrester Research, explained that if developers assume the client is trusted, it could be open to attacks if neither client nor server is validated.  Peled claimed that Visual WebGui is immune to problems such as leaving data in memory on the client. The client, he noted,  displays the state of the server on the client, behaving as a mirror of the server. Visual WebGui passes metadata between the client and the server, with nothing else going back and forth.

The Visual WebGui SDK will be enabled for Microsoft Silverlight development, and Peled said that the company would be the first framework that allows such a wide enterprise development of Silverlight.


Remember the mainframe
“If you remember the mainframe of 10 to 15 years ago, which was serving big enterprises or systems before the Web era, this is the structure,” Peled said. “What we’re doing is putting the mainframe structure on the Web.”

The company was founded when Guy, a 32-year-old programmer and former chief architect of business process management provider Israeli FileNet (IFN), started work on the tool three years ago. After consulting with his father, Navot, who had marketing experience in the software industry, the two held a soft launch in mid-2007. There have been 150,000 downloads of the tool, which was officially launched Jan. 24, the company said.

Though Visual WebGui is free and open source, the company expects to form development partnerships, as it has done with Microsoft and SAP, and plans to offer enterprise dedicated controls and components and plug-in support.

The Visual WebGui DLL and SDK are available for download on the company site.





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