Did you ever wonder why there are more than 30 Java web-app frameworks? And it's not just Java. Are they really that different? Or is it more likely that none of them solve the problem well-enough to be satisfying?
We believe most current application design patterns are fundamentally flawed. Although you can make them work (if you get a big enough hammer) the resulting product is often unsatisfying--and always expensive. We've developed browser-compute, a new programming model that helps control the cost and complexity of modern application construction.
We've also developed backdraft, a free and open source a reference implementation of browser-compute. Using backdraft, we can build rich and powerful applications that look and behave as native desktop apps, yet implement the user interface entirely within the browser, finally, truly fulfilling the promise of "write once, run anywhere".
ALTOVISO invests the majority of its resources allocated to free and open source software developing tools and libraries to lower the complexity and cost of building browser-hosted applications that rival desktop applications in usability and features. The projects listed below are mostly authored by ALTOVISO consultants and available under a BSD-style license.
A Javascript framework for building browser-hosted GUIs 100% within the browser--no plugin, no server-side programming--with all the awesomeness of a native app, but without all the pain.
backdraft fundamentally changes the mental model of browser programming by lifting the programmer out of the HTML/DOM tar pit into a modern and rich programming environment. HTML is abstracted away and replaced with a hierarchy of intelligent programming components—no more markup, no more Javascript snippets sprinkled throughout a static document.
bdLoad is a highly optimized Javascript module loader that implements the CommonJS asynchronous module definition specification and more.
bdLoad places the highest value on minimum size, and built versions are typically less that 3.5K! bdLoad fully implements the CommonJS asynchronous module definition specification as well as a number of additional features not found in other loaders, including has.js integration, enhanced debugging support, and high configurability.
bdBuild is a program to compile a web app into an optimized set of resources for fast loading.
bdBuild includes several novel features not found in other build/optimizer programs including CommonJS asynchronous module definition module bundling, Dojo pragma processing, has.js folding, generalized replacements, CSS compacting, and other important features.
bdParse is a a Javascript library that transforms Javascript source code into an abstract syntax tree of Javascript objects.
Unlike other Javascript parsers that are tightly woven into a particular application, bdParse is intended to function as a general Javascript parser library to be used as the basis for other tools. It makes no premature optimizations that discard information that could be important to downline machinery (for example, since the tokenizer does not discard comments, bdParse can be used to construct applications leveraging semantic comments).
bdRead is a browser-hosted API reader that's intelligent, extendable, and blazing fast.
bdRead started life as a sample backdraft application, but proved so useful that it's been moved to a separate subproject. It is currently being used to host the backdraft reference manual here.
