Founded in 1955, Hager group, based in Germany, is a leading provider of solutions and services for electrical installations across residential, commercial and industrial buildings. Hager’s range of solutions and services extends across energy distribution, smart home, security systems and building automation.
challenge
Find the right Graphical User Interface development process
Prior to working with MicroEJ, Hager had little experience in developing embedded user interfaces with graphical displays. Their first prototyping attempt of the alarm keyboard GUI was designed in HTML in order to share the UI/UX specifications with the Marketing team on a PC. Unfortunately, this solution was inefficient as HTML development took too long, and not flexible for fast iterations. As a result, this solution would not be used for product development.
MicroEJ in action
MicroEJ meets Hager’s three top expectations
Fast Graphical User Interface prototyping
Using the MicroEJ SDK and its simulation capabilities, Hager engineers were able to make their Virtual Device in hours and to quickly develop a first version of the GUI for Marketing feedback. Thanks to the Virtual Device, a realistic simulation of user interaction with the display and buttons helped in refining the specification on a daily basis with all project members including Marketing, R&D and Sales.
Rapid software development
Once Hager developers and the marketing team agreed on the prototype definition, they could reuse the entire Java pre-development code of the GUI application, hence drastically reducing the development effort of the alarm keyboard.
As the electronics for the keyboard were not ready yet, software developers were able to continue developing the virtual device in parallel to the electronics design. The project manager was able to remove software activity from the critical path of the project.
Highly secure and reliable software
Hager leveraged the simulation capabilities to intensively test – without hardware – the GUI application software to validate its completeness and robustness.
Thanks to the virtualization and the automatic RAM memory management, developers recognized the MicroEJ solution to be robust while coping with potential small errors unnoticeable by the user. This increased the product robustness and enhanced user experience.
We chose MicroEJ to save time. It is a flexible, reliable and secure solution which we are very satisfied with. We didn’t have any return of this product. This is something very important for us since the quality attests to our brand image.
Christophe TEILLOT - Senior Software Engineer at Hager
Benefits
Product benefits from MicroEJ
The virtual product prototype enabled short iterations for fast decision making across all project stakeholders.
Software development time using MicroEJ software platform was reduced by a factor of 3.
