Zeepe.com

Loading content, please wait ...

Microsoft PDC 2005: Zeepe and the rich client story

Of all the presentations made at Microsoft’s recent 2005 Professional Developer Conference, one of the most interesting to those of us involved with the Windows web browsing platform was made by Michael Wallent, (General Manager, Windows Client Platform & Documents) in a talk entitled “Choosing the Right Presentation Technology: Windows Presentation Foundation (“Avalon”), Windows Forms, ASP.NET, IE and More”.

In what may have come as a surprise to those who were expecting a PDC message of “.Net/Avalon and nothing else is the only way forward”, Wallent revealed that Microsoft – no doubt spurred on by the successes that Google, Yahoo, Saleforce.com and others have been achieving with browser-based DHTML ‘web apps’ – has decided to hedge its bets with Windows web browsing and introduce a selection of new tools and resources that leverage this ubiquitous platform.

ASP.NET Atlas is described as “a package of new Web development technologies that integrates an extensive set of client script libraries with the rich, server-based development platform of ASP.NET 2.0”. Atlas is already being deployed in beta on MSFT properties such as MSN, Hotmail and Start.com in support of a more ‘ajaxian’ architecture. In addition we saw an even greater emphasis on web services, several more exposed APIs (search, mapping, etc.). and - in the Vista timeframe - WPF/E and WPF in the browser.

For today’s corporate Widows client base, though, these powerful technologies will be largely emasculated when running in the browser. Internet Explorer is an increasingly (and necessarily) locked-down commodity product, and the upcoming IE7 – albeit introducing some significant and welcome additions to the Trident engine – has more sandboxing and an even ‘noisier’ tabbed UI which, although optional, will make the browser yet more restrictive and even less capable as a convincing host for industrial strength ‘web apps’ for Windows.

The next step in Microsoft’s current web/rich/smart client story is to migrate your browser-hosted apps to WinForms and then – in 5 or 6 years – to Avalon/WPF. But the much more immediate, less wasteful and much less expensive choice is to deploy a custom host framework for the Windows web browsing platform that can expose the full ‘richness’ available from today’s web applications.

MeadCo recognised the need for such a framework at Microsoft’s “100 days into the Internet” 1996 PDC, and later that year we were demonstrating early code to our Microsoft contacts. In the years since, enthusiastic customer feedback has resulted in the evolution of MeadCo’s Zeepe into the world’s most powerful and feature-rich custom host framework for the Windows web browsing platform.

Zeepe rich client applications speak the language of today's 'web’ applications, but go beyond the browser in favour of the power of scriptable custom windows, 'native' UI elements and access to the wealth of components already installed on a Windows PC. The framework is distributable free of charge to Windows client machines, whilst the licensing and security of individual applications is handled by technology that has been proven over eight years and on millions of client machines.

The Zeepe framework is fully compatible with version 5.0 and later of the Windows web browsing platform on Windows 2000 through to Windows Vista Beta 1. The good news is that - following discussions with some of the senior IE team members under mutual NDA at PDC 2005 – for the foreseeable future, compatibility for Zeepe and its integrated print management module ScriptX in future releases of the OS and the browsing platform is assured.