Press Release

December 09, 1999

OTTAWA, Canada - 9 December 1998: Espial Group Inc. announced today the release of Espial Espresso v3.0, their third generation Personal Java GUI toolkit. Espial™ Espresso, best described as the "Swing" for embedded Java, is the only way to develop consistent cross platform embedded Java applications. "Espial Espresso provides developers with a high performance, rich user interface framework for PersonalJava. Its small footprint and complete feature set make it possible to add richer functionality to Java applications written for the PersonalJava environment in a significantly shorter period of time" says Samir Mitra, director of marketing and business development at Sun Microsystems.

Espial Espresso, the industry's only lightweight embedded Java GUI toolkit, is the only choice for developing applications for Java technology based devices like PDAs, smart phones, set-top boxes, hand-held, mobile and other Internet devices. The corporate mobile and hand-held device is emerging fast and Espial Espresso provides manufacturers a significant time-to-market advantage for developing focused applications that target the various vertical markets including medical, courier, real estate, retail and sales force automation.

"We have set the standard for performance, size and functionality in the consumer and industrial electronics industry and have developed the only brandable solution for today's Java technology based device manufacturers" said Jaison Dolvane, president of Espial Group Inc. "Espial Espresso provides extensive branding capabilities that allow device manufacturers to retain full control of the look and feel of their device. Applications developed using Espial Espresso can now dynamically adapt to the look and feel of their host device within a distributed environment."

Espial Espresso is optimized for the constraints of minimal resource environments and boasts an extremely small memory footprint of less than 175K. Designed to the pixel by graphic designers and user interface experts, Espial Espresso supports diverse visual displays and offers the most advanced collection of widgets on the market today. Espial Espresso v3.0 offers new professionally designed user interface components that include buttons, checkboxes, radio buttons, lists, tables, trees, word-wrapped editors which have been designed to make the most efficient use of screen real estate and provide infinite flexibility for various displays.

Other exciting new features include unsurpassed layout flexibility, seamless application deployment, and threadsafe management without the performance overhead of traditional synchronization. Our advanced optimal image resource management (OIRM) for efficient image handling in low resource environments is now better than ever in Espial Espresso v3.0.

Espial Espresso couples with the latest release of Espial Architect v1.5; a rapid visual development environment for Espial Espresso and embedded Java applications. This newest version of Espial Architect now allows users to develop sophisticated performance-oriented embedded Java applications in record time.