Review: Canoo UltraLightClient Takes a New Approach to Java GUIs

ava recently celebrated its 10th birthday at JavaOne in San Francisco. It's come a long way in that time, and a decade is a long time in technology. It's a measure of its success, and of its great original design that it hasn't had to change a great deal, language- and architecture-wise, over that time. Of course what you have today may look a lot different from what you had 10 years ago, but these are as a result of evolutionary steps, rather than revolutionary steps.

One place where it was challenged 10 years ago, and is still challenged today is in the presentation layer—in the facility to easily develop the richest user experience possible. The original Java had the AWT, which took a lowest-common denominator approach to allow for cross-platform ease. This of course led to problems when users of operating systems wanted functionality that was specific to that operating system, and the lowest-common denominator approach couldn't handle that. For example, Windows users are used to two buttons on their mouse—the right button for context menus. But this couldn't be handled in a cross-platform way, as the Macintosh only used one button, and AWT had to handle both.