The ULC development environment gives the developer the flavor of building a single user fat client application while building a multi user server based application. ULC applications can be built visually using the Visual Composition Editor of the IBM VisualAge for Java development environment.

Since both the ULC Server and ULC UI Engine are built using industry standard Java they can be deployed to any platform that supports a Java2 compatible virtual machine. This currently includes a wide variety of platforms like Windows 95/98/ME/2000, Solaris, Linux, Mac, AIX etc. In addition since all ULC server applications do not have any Java-Swing user interface code, they can be deployed on Java platforms that do not currently support the Java Swing interface library (e.g. IBM's OS 390).

ULC applications are deployed on a central server allowing simplified administration, distribution and updates to clients worldwide. The UI Engine can be downloaded on the fly when the first ULC application is started.

Integration with the web is supported in many ways. All ULC applications can display web pages using the provided HTML component. In addition the UI Engine can be run as an applet within a web browser using the Java Plug-In, allowing all ULC applications to blend seamlessly with HTML based content. In contrast to building server based applications using HTML where often a developer has to build portions of the application using HTML, Java, and JavaScript etc. leading to incompatibilities depending on the web browser of the client machine, ULC provides a consistent programming model based on industry standard Java.