Here is a success story of one of our customers. Some goverment agency in some country.
Migrating from IE control to HTMLAYOUT
Problem
We have a suite of products deployed in multiple geographical locations to about 150 clients. The suite is implemented in Law Enforcement Agencies to leverage the use of technology in ensuring the safety of our communities. The product is taking advantage of HTML to render rich User Interface (UI) content. HTML and CSS provide flexibility in the implementation of the user interface, while being extremely user friendly. Most users are familiar with browsing the internet, thus comfortable with the concepts of ‘clicking’, ‘hyperlinks’, and basic control behaviors.
Our product is rendering its user interface through Microsoft Internet Explorer controls with Microsoft Visual Basic to handle events and data manipulation. With the advent of new versions of Internet Explorer, we are anticipating a multitude of problems in rendering the User Interface. The solution is to find a third party control capable of rendering the same HTML user interface while requiring a minimum of rewriting of the existing html code base.
Solution
Our user interface is a transformation of the data retrieved from the database into HTML by using XML/XSLT transformation. We have a variety of XSLT documents that render the user interface. By implementing HtmLayout into our legacy products, we are able to continue rendering the same UI while making a minimum of changes to the XSLT. Any discrepancy in the usability is minimum and unnoticed by our client base.
HtmLayout is straight forward in its implementation and provides a number of valuable advanced capabilities. Most of the standard HTML and CSS code is portable from IE to HtmLayout. With ‘Behaviors’, it is easy to link the HTML events to code in Visual Basic. Behaviors are also used to enhance the standard functionality of HtmLayout.
HtmLayout is bringing stability into the User Interface as it is not depending on Microsoft Internet Explorer model. HtmLayout ensures User Interface consistency throughout our products.
Why HtmLayout:
• Ease of use
• Ease of migration from IE
• Support standard HTML and CSS
• Minimum investment in conversion of HTML
• Implementation of custom ‘behaviors’
• No scripting (vbscript/javascript), fewer technologies involved = fewer defects
• Simplify pages, thus reducing risk of defects
• Robust handling of messages between HTML and VB
• Responsive support team