With all the recent AJAX buzz, there's renewed interest in toolkits that can abstract away the inherent nastiness of that style of development. TIBCO's General Interface is one such toolkit, and today's 8-minute screencast excerpts highlights from a demo shown to me yesterday by Kevin Hakman. He's a founder of General Interface, which TIBCO acquired last fall.
Things I'd want from an AJAX toolkit include: browser independence, a high-level object model, a productive GUI builder, strong debugging, robust local storage, and autonomous interaction with remote XML-based services. With the exception of browser independence -- the current product is IE only, with Mozilla/Firefox support expected to beta this summer -- you can see examples of all those things happening.
I have lots of questions that I won't be able to answer until I get my hands on the software. But the screencast illustrates why I'm keen to give it a try.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/05/25.html#a1238