Wednesday, September 2, 2009, 9am – 10am, Room PER II B130

Introduction to the software firm Itelligence by Nicola Fankhauser and presentation of Fabien Ropraz Master Offline Use of Web Applications.

Are you looking for a good start after your Computer Sciences studies? We at Itelligence are looking for bright young people, offering interesting job opportunities - be it as a trainee during your studies or in a permanent junior position. Either way, we take care to support you with personal mentoring. A well balanced approach between technology intensive work and consulting activity, paired with individual training allows you to apply and continually develop your skillset. The first part of the presentation will be about us at Itelligence and how you might fit in. During the second part, we'll cover a more technical subject with the presentation of a REST-Service framework developed at Itelligence Switzerland in collaboration with Fabien Ropraz from the University of Fribourg. Nicola Fankhauser completed his Master's degree in Computer Science in 2004 at the DIUF. He is currently working in various projects as developer and technical consultant, and is responsible for a small team in the Business Technology business unit at Itelligence Switzerland.

Ropraz's Master Dissertation Abstract

Within less than two decades, software applications have undergone considerable changes in their design model in order to gain in efficiency, user-friendliness and availability. After the traditional heavy clients installed on the user's computer and the online web applications accessible from everywhere without installation, the evolution continued with the emergence of rich clients, which aim at combining the strengths of the fat and thin clients while getting rid of each one's inconveniences. Among the different rich technologies, Rich Desktop Application (RDA) symbolizes the best achievement of this convergence process, as this type of application is able to run without depending on network connectivity. This offline capability precisely responds to an actual and increasing need of users, who require that their applications should operate under any circumstances even in situations of mobility, prone to connection losses. To fulfill that demand and give users always more flexibility, a few new technologies such as Google Gears have appeared to enable web applications to work offline. In addition to clarifying the concept of rich client and exploring the rich application development technologies, the master thesis focuses on examining and describing how web applications can be taken offline with the help of the Gears plug-in.