Visual WebGui introduces a different approach to AJAX front-ends. While the trend is towards empowering the client (browser) with more capabilities, enabling direct consumption of services by client side objects and distributing processing between the client and the server, WebGui adopts the server based computing approach whereby service consumption and processing is handled on the server and human interaction is handled on the client. This model provides intrinsic benefits for enterprise applications since it provides additional measures of security and control which are not available on browser based solutions. This approach, called "Empty Client", employs de-coupled GUI components which decouple GUI logic from GUI presentation (rendering) and enable remoting of the display/input capture between the client (browser) and the server. It is this approach that provides an even greater benefit by enabling application logic (usually entailing both business and presentation logic) to be handled within one, stateful, object-oriented environment developed in a high level, OOP language such as C#, VB.Net or Java rather than a mix between Javascript and a server based language.
Using a homogenous platform provides developers with immeasurable productivity benefits and enables developers to make better use of existing assets, knowledge and experience rather than requiring the steep learning curve of AJAX. Visual WebGui provides server side controls which behave like existing desktop application controls both in design time and in run-time. These controls manifest themselves as AJAX controls on the browser in run-time and look like their desktop counterparts. The architecture of the system is in no way limited to representing these base controls in their current "desktop" look and feel since it makes use of de-coupled components. Our initial offering contains the popular Microsoft controls that are a basic part of any Windows based application. These controls provide a huge productivity benefit to web developers who lag behind their desktop bretheren, while supporting the most common needs of desktop application developers without letting them down.
In addition the system is extremely extensible. Visual WebGui Rich Internet Applications Platform enables extending the framework by adding additional controls, changing themes/flavors (skins), creating composite controls based on base controls and creating gateway components. Since ultimately Visual WebGui is an extension to the app servers context (in the case of .Net an extention to IIS/ASP.net) it can interoperate with client side and server side legacy code. This means that Visual WebGui Web UIs can host and interoperate with existing HTML/Javascript client only controls or with embedded DOM objects such as Applets and ActiveX controls. Similarly existing web applications can interoperate with WebGui components/forms/windows since they are in essence URLs like any other sharing the same application and session context.