As the creators of RichFaces, Exadel is involved in a large number of projects where RichFaces is being used. In most cases, the development is done by remote teams where the customer is working with Exadel’s teams in Eastern Europe. In some instances one or more developer could be at the customer site as well.
One of the challenges that we always faced is how to create page mockups when working with remote teams. The usual approach is for a designer to create mockups in some format and then email them to the team or the manager for feedback and review. Of course this approach presents a number of challenges such as time delay, and difficulty in providing feedback to the mockups. You end up writing on the graphic with arrows and text suggesting where to place or move various visual components.
Image if you could create and share mockups with any number of remote users instantly? Any changes you made to the mockups would instantly be seen by every one else viewing the session. Let’s say you need to move the Login component slighty to the left, you move it to the left and everyone viewing the session sees the change. No more going back and forth via email. Considers this as a “live whiteboard” where any number of remote users can create mockups in real time. Think of it as Google Docs for mockups.
This is a good time to introduce a new service from Exadel called Tiggr. Tiggr allows to create and share mockups in real time with collaboration. In the near future we will add the ability to generate a RichFaces UI from the mockup and can extend it for any other UI technology.
We are going to open the service to everyone very soon. If you are interested to try the service right now, please send me an email. I will post more details about various features tomorrow. For now, here is a screen shot of how the new service will look:
Designing a Login page:
Max Katz 
Is this a cross platform program? Looks like a big win!
Yes, all you need is a browser (and Flash).
Flash?? Boo 🙂 HTML5 FTW
Next version will be in HTML5 🙂
I’m excited to see this as OSS, could be *VERY* useful. Will there be abstractions to allow it to create other JSF kits (or possibly other technologies: Flex, JavaFX, Swing, etc)?
@Jason: yes, it could be any technology, JSF, Flex, JavaFX, etc.
Hey sir, I’m interested on it, but….what is your email? Thanks for the good job!
max at exadel dot com
great job, this is what I was look for long time ago.
But when will this product be available to community ????
will this product be an open source or commercial one ???
@samy: it’s going to be hosted on our servers so you won’t have to install anything. It’s going to be free, we might add premium features for a fee later on.
Great, but when when exadel publish this service ?????????
in exadel web site I did not find any notification about it.
All the community needs service like this, because we have no visual layout designer in Eclipse like virtual studio.
also Jboss tools plugin dont provide user friendly layout designer.
and you still forced to write your tags manually.
I suppose that tiggr service from exadel will like Google document drawing service features, but for designing web interface layout.
@samy: the service is still in development, we are almost done. I will post on my blog when the service is ready.