Technology Description

mPire is a computer software system that is used to generate user interfaces for web-based applications that follow a JSR 168 user interface standard - the newest and most prevalent UI standard in the Java world. The system contains proprietary logic and designs built on an open platform, leveraging a completely open source based application and technical architecture. The owners have made the application available under an open source, or free licensing approach.

The system was created by the founder to help automate the creation of web-sites. The system is quite unique for an open source based application in the breadth of its capability for quickly creating complex user interfaces with little coding.

The system supports the following open standards:

• AJAX
  
• Struts
  
• Netbeans
  
• Eclipse
  
• JSR 168
  
• RMI

It also supports the following open source third party tools

• Spring
  
• Hiberntate
  
• ANT
  
• Liferay
  
• Tomcat
  

The system leverages some best of breed open source infrastructure tools, and uses an Eclipse based development environment to allow developers to very quickly design and deploy user interfaces with JSR 168 based portlets with little to no Java coding. It has also allowed them to very quickly assembly a full JEE (Java Enterprise Edition) application architecture without have to create much of it themselves. The system operates like "glueware" to bring the best of breed tools together in one unified environment.

The developers have future plans to extend this user interface development platform to a full application development environment that can be used to very quickly generate new end to end Java based applications, which have a very low total cost of ownership due to the full open source nature of the deployment. They also have the intent of adding created user interface capabilities that fully support the new Web 2.0 wave that is sweeping the marketplace. This includes collaboration tools like Wikis, communication tools like Chat, and others like Mashups.

Potential Benefits of The Technology

There exist several commercial companies now that provide this level of application development: IBM, BEA, and Borland. Their tools are all costly, and have many proprietary extensions that lock end users into them. However, there are no pure open source tools at present that support this model.

The model from Foresters Research shows an assessment of the leading Model Driven Development tools on the market, and the standards that they support.

Contact details:

Mr. Ahmen Hansan,
TransIT mPower Labs (P) Ltd.
Email: hasan@mpower.co.in