ICEfaces RIA Journal

ICEsoft Technologies released ICEface Community Edition. A breakthrough for the Java community, ICEfaces Community Edition greatly simplifies the process of creating and deploying enterprise-level AJAX applications. Java developers can now develop sophisticated applications at no cost, using the Community Edition of ICEfaces.

Now in beta release, ICEfaces Community Edition harnesses the power of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), a technique for developing interactive Web-based applications that have the richness of conventional software programs residing on the user’s PC. In contrast to more recent “AJAX toolkits,” ICEfaces offers a sophisticated framework and a comprehensive set of components that are abstracted from client runtime software, thereby dramatically reducing the cost and complexity of application development.

ICEfaces leverages the entire J2EE ecosystem of tools and execution environments. Rich web application features are developed in pure Java, and in a pure thin-client model.  There are no Applets or proprietary browser plug-ins required.  ICEfaces applications are rendered as JavaServe Faces (JSF) applications, so J2EE application development skills apply directly, and Java developers are completely sheltered from doing any JavaScript related development.

The benefits of the ICEfaces Community Edition are:

Develop and deploy thin-client rich Internet applications using pure Java J2EE standards-compliant technologies and tools;

Provides a rich component suite including Auto-complete, Menu, Table, Tree, Tabs, Drag & Drop, animation effects, and many more;

Provides incremental thin-client UI updates without plug-ins for a more responsive user-experience;

Supports server-initiated UI updates—removes traditional web application request/response communication barrier;

Support for collaborative application development (Chat, Webcast, etc.);

Deploys to J2EE application servers (Tomcat, WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss, Oracle, etc.) and supports all the popular browsers (IE, Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, etc.);

“We believe ICEfaces Community Edition is the product the J2EE community has been waiting for,” said Robert Lepack, vice president of marketing for ICEsoft. “This product is available for download at www.icesoft.com under a completely free commercial license. Once developers try ICEfaces, we’re confident it will become the platform of choice for all their rich enterprise application initiatives.”

Among the many innovations in ICEfaces that simplify AJAX for Java developers is the ICEfaces Component Suite, a complete set of rich JSF components that take full advantage of the benefits of the ICEfaces framework.  With this release of ICEfaces, new components such as menus, auto-complete, drag-and-drop capabilities, and animation effects have been added to an already extensive list of rich UI components.

ICEfaces Community Edition is immediately available.  For additional information about ICEfaces, or to download ICEfaces Community Edition, please visit www.icesoft.com.