ALES project is a set of frameworks for rapid GUI application development (AGUI, AGraph, ADMGUI and ADMEdit frameworks) and for super-rapid GUI application development (AAF and ALab frameworks). The parent framework ALab is designed for development of “single-object” standalone Java applications (or Java applets) which is conventionally called “labs”. The term “lab” originally denoted educational laboratory work (solo training; see NumLabs project as ALES implementation for trainings) but such applications are often required by scientific, engineering or other research works.

The main feature of lab applications is the following: a new user of the application must be able to start working with it immediately – without any training or reading help reference. The main data of lab applications can be stored in a single object associated with a file. The object is usually hierarchically organized and usually stores all input and output data values of a computational application. Thus the features like searching multiple objects and simultaneous usage of several objects/files are usually absent in labs.

Super-rapid application development takes place here due to several programming approaches including automatic GUI forms creation by the structure of default data file (without a big job on metadata input that is typical for other UI forms creation frameworks).

ALab as well as its children frameworks ADMGUI and ADMEdit utilizes ADM framework from ADAM project to support very easy and flexible data management. ALab also depends on AMath framework from ANum project to support formulas/matrices rendering/editing, specific math exceptions, computations with arbitrary precision numbers (e.g. editing number precision, counting math operations, etc).