On Jan 16, 2008, at 7:50 AM, Vivian Steller wrote:
Second, we're currently evaluating different view technologies.
Definitely, JSF is one of the major ones that we're putting an eye
on as it is a "natural" successor of JSP for building web UIs.
Beside investigating approaches on how Magnolia's back-end GUI can
evolute we also consider on how technologies can ease front-end
development, e.g. enhance development of AJAX enabled sites.
However, all this is currently work-in progress and documentation
will follow.
For the back-end GUI, I would think that GWT would be a natural fit
for the java-based nature of the project. I'm going to be integrating
a GWT project into one of my magnolia projects shortly (it will be
used in a template - so on the frontend... not backend in my case).
At one point, I was thinking of writing my own replacement for the
dialog engine that would render pages using GWT and ajax to avoid the
popup window, but that's really low on my priority list at the moment.
Yes, it would be a PITA to port the entire admin interface into GWT
the first time - but if you are considering redoing the admin
interface anyway, there would be a lot of benefits:
1. All of your java coders can contribute to the admin-interface
GUI... not just javascript masochists
2. Cross-platform code is handled by the wizard-behind-the-curtain
inside the GWT compiler
3. Unit-tests of functional elements are easy to develop and use
4. The code it generates is extremely fast.
5. The servlets you write can tie into your existing java
architecture, and you can serialize value objects down for the
client side to consume / display
Of course, if I'm advocating GWT, I'd also propose waiting until GWT
1.5 comes out - since GWT 1.4 doesn't support generics and only
supports Java 1.4 syntax... but then again Magnolia only uses 1.5 for
test stuff at the moment, so perhaps that wouldn't be an issue.
Also - Since most of the developers are using IntelliJ IDEA - the GWT
support in that is excellent. (Eclipse has good GWT support as well -
but IntelliJ really makes it easy)
Ryan
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