Alpharetta, Georgia - (The Hosting News) - January 10, 2006 - The first rapid application development (RAD) platform to be offered as open source has been released. ClearNova's, ThinkCAP JX offers developers a fast, efficient and cost-effective way to create AJAX-enabled rich Internet applications - and is the first visual development environment for building rich Internet applications.

ThinkCAP JX combines the power of AJAX, J2EE and open source to enable organizations and their developers to build the web-based applications that run their businesses. ThinkCAP JX is available for download at: http://www.thinkcap.org. In addition, in late February, the project web site will be the location for community feedback, shared experiences, bug fixes, feature requests and sharing knowledge with other users.

ClearNova will provide training, consulting, maintenance and support for the product. In addition to releasing ThinkCAP JX under the GPL license for non-commercial distribution, ThinkCAP will also be available to those needing a commercial license and indemnification at a nominal price.

Byron Matheson, CEO of ClearNova expalined, ''Our customers, as well as the 750 organizations that downloaded our beta have spoken loud and clear: they want an open source, royalty free framework and engine that allows them to fully exploit the collaborative nature of the community and that does not lock them into a proprietary runtime. We are confident that releasing the ThinkCAP JX framework as an open-source product will provide customers with the ability to realize the power of AJAX-enabled web applications as a better alternative to traditional client server business programs, while greatly accelerating adoption of ThinkCAP as the gold-standard for RAD platforms.''

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a set of programming techniques that allow web applications to be much more responsive and provide usability on par with traditional client/server applications. Using AJAX techniques, applications can act on data and events as the user interacts with the system by communicating to the server and updating portions of a page immediately instead of always refreshing the entire page.

The results are faster, more robust applications. Until now, AJAX development has been highly labor intensive and required very sophisticated programming skills and a complete change in how developers approach their work. ThinkCAP JX allows Java and 4GL developers to rapidly build applications without having to become JavaScript experts. ThinkCAP JX provides event-driven AJAX development so that developers can code on either the client or the server-or both; because developers can leverage Java to make changes to the user interface, it is easier for them to develop and maintain the application. ThinkCAP JX can also be used to add AJAX functionality to existing Java applications.

Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions elaborated, ''ClearNova has helped bridge the gap between AJAX benefits and J2EE complexity - and added a significant RAD benefit to the process with the release of its ThinkCAPJX dev framework. The ThinkCAP JX release recognizes the RAD benefits of reducing handcrafting and scripting. While many applications are being AJAX-ified with a bevy of open source tools, frameworks, and home-grown customizations, there have been few options for bringing an automation level to the process that helps Visual Basic and PowerBuilder types enter the practice."

The ThinkCAP JX Framework integrates almost 25 open source frameworks and engines including Struts and Hibernate and provides a seamless framework that ties them all together. It also adds value to open source through ThinkCAP Workbench, a highly visual design environment.

At the core of ThinkCAP's AJAX framework are two popular open source AJAX projects: prototype and script.aculo.us. These libraries were chosen because they provide excellent base functionality but also because they are the two projects driving the AJAX functionality of the Ruby-On-Rails project and therefore are being frequently updated. Other open source and standards-based projects in ThinkCAP's core architecture are:
OpenRico,
JUnit,
log4J,
JFreeChart,
Apache Axis,
Apache Commons (Validator, BeanUtils, Collections, Digester, and Logging),
Castor,
JEP,
Jakarta (Oro, POI, and Regexp),
Apache (Lucene, Batik, and Bcel),
JavaTidy,
and Xerces.

ThinkCAP JX runs on any operating system and Java application servers such as IBM WebSphere, BEA Weblogic, Oracle 10g, Sybase EA Server, JBoss, Tomcat, Jetty, and Resin.