[eweek] IBM Launches Maqetta HTML5 Tool as Open-Source Answer to Flash, Silverlight

959 Views 7 Replies 8 Participants Last post by VulcanDragon, Apr 14, 2011

0xygen

Discussion Starter · Apr 12, 2011

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IBM announced Maqetta, an HTML5 authoring tool for building desktop and mobile user interfaces, and also announced the contribution of the open-source technology to the Dojo Foundation.

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â€œThe problem in a nutshell is the Ajax ecosystem falls short in terms of tooling as compared to the likes of Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight and similar tools,â€ said Rod Smith, vice president of Emerging Internet Technologies at IBM, told eWEEK. Maqetta is pronounced like â€œMakettaâ€ and is a spelling variation of â€œmaqueta,â€ the Spanish word for mock-up, David Boloker, chief technology officer for Emerging Internet Technologies at IBM Software Group, told eWEEK.

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The Maqetta application itself is authored in HTML5/Ajax, and therefore runs in the browser without requiring additional plug-ins or downloads. Maqetta features include:

WYSIWYG visual page editor for drawing out user interfaces;
drag/drop mobile UI authoring within an exact-dimension device silhouette, such as the silhouette of an iPhone;
simultaneous editing in either design or source views;
deep support for CSS styling (the application includes a full CSS parser/modeler);
mechanism for organizing a UI prototype into a series of "application states" (aka "screens" or "panels"), which allows a UI design to define interactivity without programming;
Web-based review and commenting feature where the author can submit a live UI mock-up for review by his team members;
"wire-framing" feature that allows UI designers to create UI proposals that have a hand-drawn look;
theme editor for customizing the visual styling of a collection of widgets;
export options that allow for smooth hand-off of the UI mock-ups into leading developer tools such as Eclipse; and
its code base has a toolkit-independent architecture that allows for plugging in arbitrary widget libraries and CSS themes.

The Preview 1 release of the Maqetta application is available for the community to use for free at the open-source project's Website, http://maqetta.org. Alternatively, users can download builds that they can install on their own servers.

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ZHoob2004

· #2 · Apr 13, 2011

I'm wondering right now, why isn't this in the top news threads on the front page?

This is really big news for the progression of html5 and it looks like nobody has noticed. Maybe people will finally start considering html5 as an alternative to flash with a development environment like this.

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newpc

· #3 · Apr 13, 2011

yes! die adobe die! hate bloatware

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srsdude

· #4 · Apr 13, 2011

I'm ready for anything that can replace flash

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Tator Tot

· #5 · Apr 13, 2011

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Originally Posted by newpc;13106285
yes! die adobe die! hate bloatware

Flash is not bloatware, it's just poorly implementation and design.

The issue is that Adobe does not keep constant updates out for it, and it has many security flaws to boot.

Bloatware is the stuff that is added to prebuilt PC's like Dell/HP's Game Studio things, which give you 5 minute demo's without full games and take up 5GB of space for all the trial software.

On Topic: I'd love to see an analysis of this since I don't know HTML 5 well (on the coding level.) More so since I probably won't have time to put my hands on it right away.

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takealready

· #6 · Apr 13, 2011

Quote:

Originally Posted by ZHoob2004;13106255
I'm wondering right now, why isn't this in the top news threads on the front page?

This is really big news for the progression of html5 and it looks like nobody has noticed. Maybe people will finally start considering html5 as an alternative to flash with a development environment like this.

bro I noticed. Part of what my business does is make websites & UI's. I agree this is big news for me (and my kind).

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Schoat333

· #7 · Apr 13, 2011

This is great news. Time for me to learn something new...

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VulcanDragon

· #8 · Apr 14, 2011

But I hate IBM. Hate, hate, hate. I like the idea, but why oh why couldn't it come from a company I want to stab in the face?!?

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