With the ubiquity of the Internet and the web, organizations have been relying more and more on thin-clients and on web applications. They have been shying away from rich (or fat) clients in an effort to facilitate deployment, increase accessibility and reduce costs. While web applications have fulfilled some of the promises, organizations (and users) have also learned that thin clients and web technologies (HTTP, HTML, JavaScript, Flash etc) have limitations and that some problems are still better handled by rich or fat clients. Furthermore, while great progress has been made in the area of tools and technologies to develop and run web-based UIs, such applications remain difficult (hence costly) to design, build and maintain. The new breed of rich client technologies found in offerings such as Eclipse RCP or .NET leverage the best of both worlds: the advantage of connected, easily updated applications and the user-friendliness and ease of development of fat clients.
OpenTime is such an application. It is a suite of modules and subsystems (Eclipse plugins) designed to facilitate the deployment, use and management of time and expense data. It was designed, from the start, to support the set of standards from the HR-XML ( http://www.hr-xml.org) consortium and to be able to interoperate gracefully with legacy or new enterprise backend systems.
Mirasol Op'nWorks provides the basic OpenTime suite free of charge through an Open Source license (CPL). Enterprise and advanced OpenTime modules (for front end or back end) are available under varying licencing models from Mirasol Op'nWorks and eventually from other organizations.
With OpenTime, you can:
All this is exposed using the functionality of the Eclipse SWT and JFace APIs who support native widgets for a fully conforming and native application look & feel.
The OpenTime client can be used inside an Eclipse-based workbench such as the Eclipse IDE or IBM WebSphere Studio. It can also be deployed as an Eclipse 3.x standalone rich client since it makes use of the RCP (rich client platform) feature of the Eclipse 3.x framework
OpenTime is pure Java™. It can thus be deployed on any platform/environment that runs the Eclipse platform. This includes Win32, Mac OS/X, Linux, QNX and others.
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