Jade's Juice wipes away the grey

Ever get the feeling your new application is too much like the old application - text in grey boxes, windows upon Windows?

Christchurch software development tools company Jade, a division of Aoraki Corporation, is offering an alternative - Juice (Jade User Interface Construction Engine), which enables developers to create unique interfaces with standard graphical programs such as Adobe Photoshop or Macromedia.

Juice will be bundled with the latest release, Jade 5.1, being shipped today.

Owen Scott, Jade's sales and marketing general manager, said 5.1 was a consolidation release, containing translators for XML (extensible markup language) and other emerging technologies.

It also had a statistical capability allowing developers and system administrators to monitor the performance of Jade applications in a distributed environment.

Mr Scott said Juice came from frustrations multimedia specialists in the Aoraki-Cardinal-Jade organisation had in combining their work with that of traditional application programmers.

"They produced CD Rom applications and graphical user interfaces and were very successful, but there were always difficulties drawing the two worlds together," Mr Scott said.

"It was incredibly labour intensive to integrate the interface with the back end of the application."

Jade's research and development team came up with Juice as a way to bridge that gap.

Mr Scott said it turned system development on its head. Instead of starting with the application engine and hacking an interface on later, systems developers could take business requirements, design an interface which users would find attractive and easy to use, then construct the logic and data structures to deliver on that.

Because it is written in the same, object-oriented Jade technology, it avoids conflicts and integration issues present with other tools.

Jade has been using Juice since last year, and Mr Scott said the time spent creating working interfaces had dropped from the month or more required before Juice to a few days.

He said e-commerce was making the front end of software, not the data end, the place to start.

"People used to have systems where the users were staff, so they would put them on a training course.

"If the users didn't like the system, tough.

E-commerce also made branding more important.

"Increasingly the only direct contact a customer may have with an organisation is online, so it needs to communicate through the interface to differentiate itself."

Creating graphical interfaces to enterprise applications on Windows machines required a great deal of system overhead, particularly to control external devices such as the mouse.

"The people we want to use Jade are not necessarily programmers," Mr Scott said. "There are all these graphic arts companies doing user interface, using web tools to do what is essentially web design."

Dotshell, a Jade partner based in Japan, is using a beta version of Juice to develop the GUI (graphical user interface) for its manufacturing resource planning (MRP) system built in Jade. Spokesman Marc Ward said it wanted to get away from standard Windows style GUIs.

"MRP and enterprise resource planning GUIs and screen layouts are notoriously complex and difficult to understand, and must contain a large amount of information," he said.

Mr Scott said Jade was attaining critical mass, with 72 companies which develop applications signing up as Jade partners. They included IBM, Gen-i and Mi Services Group (formerly Motherwell).

He said companies from Australia, Singapore, India, Korea and Japan had visited Christchurch to talk about adopting Jade.

Jade costs $6400 a developer, with a 25 per cent annual maintenance fee covering support and upgrades.