Founder and CTO Dave Levett talks about a new generation of XML-based collaborative apps CREATING A TRULY open graphical client that can interface with any system has been a long sought-after goal for the computer industry as whole. Although XML creates a convenient way to interface with any system, the ability to render XML data in an open graphical user environment has been missing. In an interview with InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard and Test Center Director Steve Gillmor, Altio founder and CTO Dave Levett explains how he thinks his company’s Java-based rendering engine provides the missing piece for a new generation of XML-based collaborative applications. InfoWorld: What is it that Altio does? InfoWorld: What’s the immediate ROI behind using this? Levett: Well, if you have 500 people using an application, you can give them the power to customize it themselves without employing a whole bunch of integrators at a million [dollars] a pop to customize it. Applications are just a bunch of services that we’re connecting to and you can just view it how you want. We’ve completely separated the data from the presentation. InfoWorld: Do you have to be connected to the server to make it work? Levett: In the next release of our product we also have a version that will run completely offline, so you can be working with an application and literally just pull the plug out of your network. InfoWorld: What was the process that led to the development of this tool? Levett: The idea of having it so you could download [our product] on the fly was so you could then use it inside Net cafes and kiosks and so on, which don’t allow you to download and install plug-ins. So by default, we’ve made it work for the lowest common denominator where you have no control over installing anything. You have no admin rights to the machine. You just simply want something that can work over HTTP because you have no idea what the firewall is in the middle. But you have something that will work on virtually any browser that supports [Version] 1.1 of the JVM [Java Virtual Machine], so any 4.0 browsers and above will support our stuff. Literally, you just go to a URL and the application just starts running. InfoWorld: How big is the applet? Levett: The applet includes the whole of the database, the COMs component, and all of the controls and everything else you’d expect in an application and it’s about 200KB. InfoWorld: What kind of performance do you get? Levett: We had to build something that could work within the JVM and run very fast. It’s comparable in terms of performance to the sort of thing you’d see in Excel or Word. So when you’re scrolling things up and down and resizing columns, everything happens very, very fast. InfoWorld: Where do you think this tool will be applied? Levett: It’s really more applicable to data-centric applications — the sort of things that you would build in Visual Basic, like forms-based applications, rather than trying to rewrite PowerPoint or Word. But it could take XML data from a Word document or from an EBXML document. If you wanted to see the content that was in the spreadsheet and share it with a lot of people in real time, you could do that. We would actually treat Excel on a server almost like a database. I’m not sure we’re ready to rewrite Office, but I think some of the functionality that a lot of people use inside Office could be written using this [tool]. InfoWorld: How do you create an application? Levett: You can design our entire application and deploy it without even having to see the XML. If you do want to see how the whole thing is made up, it’s just a single XML file you can edit in Notepad. There’s no compiling. It literally takes XML that describes a user interface and it sends it to the UI. The beauty of our architecture is the XML for the look and feel and the XML for the data are only combined at the time we draw the pixels. So if the data changes in real time, every time the screen is refreshed, which is many times a second, the data changes on the screen. There’s no point at which we try and do some transformation of data and XML beforehand and then send it to the client. They’re literally stored separately on the client side and then we do queries on the data and on the UI to join together to produce what should appear on the screen. The other thing that differentiates us from most people is that our entire development environment is browser-based. We have something that works like Visual Studio but runs under a URL from anywhere. So you can log on in a Net café, build an application, hit Save, and it’s running for 200 people in that company. There’s no tools you need to carry with you, you don’t even need to own your own laptop. We’ve written our own Designer in itself, [and] it’s entirely written in XML. In fact, people have even customized the XML to build their own Designers. InfoWorld: So what’s next for you guys? Levett: The version that is coming up is the 3.0 version, which has a number of new features, including J2ME [Java 2 Micro Edition] support, full support for Web services, and the offline client. InfoWorld: Any thoughts on working with Microsoft as it relates to this? Levett: The interesting thing is that because we wrote our own Java, effectively, to do all the rendering, we don’t rely on any of the Sun graphics libraries, so our stuff actually compiles in J#. So it actually runs as potentially a .Net native application. InfoWorld: So what’s your take on Web services? Levett: I think it’s very confusing to most people because everybody’s kind of jumped on the bandwagon. What is important for Web services is all of the XML-based standards and the way in which you use services to connect up applications. The more Web services and XML there is, the more stuff we can plug into. Software Development