Product: SOFIAManufacturer: Salmon LLCAddress: 584 Ardsley Boulevard               Garden City South, New York 11530Telephone: 516-485-1118URL: www.salmonllc.com

SOFIA is an open-source tool set for quickly building database-driven applications in the J2EE and/or Swing Set. SOFIA is the Salmon Open Framework for Internet Applications. SOFIA is similar to other J2EE MVC open-source frameworks, such as Apache Struts. Since the initial release of SOFIA last year, they've had over 60,000 downloads and a great deal of positive feedback and contributions from the Open Source community.

SOFIA can be downloaded free of charge from SourceForge.

The tool set consists of an extensive Java class library of foundation components for building Web and Swing applications. The class library uses design patterns such as Model View Controller, GUI components, and event listeners to abstract and hide a lot of the plumbing code required in a typical Java database-driven application. This allows you to concentrate on business requirements and not spend a lot of time on low-level infrastructure.

SOFIA incorporates a custom tag library for building Web pages that eliminates the need for any in-line Java in JSPs. The tag library contains over 40 GUI components, with everything from simple buttons and edit fields to complex components such as trees, tables, data grids, calendars, and navigation bars. All the GUI components can be attached to back-end data sources--like relational databases, XML files, or Enterprise Java Beans--with no additional coding.

SOFIA offers tight integration with best-of-breed off-the-shelf tools: Dreamweaver for painting Web pages and IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse for the Java code. These tools combine to create a rapid application development environment similar to Dot Net Studio that makes development with the J2EE quick and easy. Unlike Dot Net Studio, this RAD tool is open source, vendor neutral, and the resulting applications can be deployed to any server with J2EE support.

Founded in 1995, Salmon LLC specializes in the development of Java applications using object oriented languages, tools, and techniques. They have offices in New York, London, and Sydney.