Many thanks for this helpful insights. I quickly summarize the
solutions we consider for magnolia. As Vivian is working on the topic
he will provide a more detailed concept soon.
The goals are:
- make magnolia GUI extendable/reusable
- improve the AdminCentral's usability
Technically we look at the following two main scenarios:
A) Webservices & and Javascript Framework
-> use extJS for rendering while magnolia is accessed through WS only
+ WS make the magnolia server highly accessible and allows nice
integrations or third party GUIs
- development on the client side (JS only) could be a nightmare
B) Use a server side control based Framework
-> main candidate is JSF (standard) but GWT could be a good
alternative as we read in this thread
+ 'normal' Java coding, serverside processing of GUI
- proprietary solution (compared to WS)
Many thanks
Philipp Bracher
On 17.01.2008, at 01:49, Seth Gottlieb wrote:
Thanks everyone. This is great!
On Jan 16, 2008 11:44 AM, Ryan Gardner <[email protected]> wrote:
On Jan 16, 2008, at 9:09 AM, Manuel Molaschi wrote:
GWT should be a great choice... but what about a more low-level AJAX
integration with less frameworks dependency?
I think there are 2 great client-side solutions:
Ext-js: ext has a stunning javascript rendering and a long list of
widgets,
but a hard learning curve and it is not so simple to integrate with
server-side java (dwr?)
Mootools: mootools is a great javascript library and has a growing
community
(check the forum!). It is not really a widget UI framework (even
if there
are a lot of plugins) but it standardize javascript syntax
ensuring very
rapid development hiding browsers differences.Ext-JS is very
nice... So nice
in fact, there is a GWT project that implements it into the GWT
framework :)
(thus reducing the learning curve and increasing the usability...
plus - you
can use GWT's native stuff to do the server-side java
communication using
whatever method you want)
http://code.google.com/p/gwt-ext/
(FYI - Most of the major external frameworks have projects that
allow you to
easily hook into GWT - (scriptaculous, yui... etc). )
The real benefit of GWT is of course when you use the java-native
stuff for
your widgets and such. You can link into gigantic libraries, but
because of
the static analysis that GWT does - it will only compile in the small
portion that you use.
On Jan 16, 2008, at 9:17 AM, Ruben Reusser wrote:
Isn't GWT lacking drag and drop support? I really would miss that
in the
admin interface afterwards. You could also consider an OpenLaszlo
Replacement of the Admin GUI
GWT out of the box doesn't have a drag and drop library. It has been
extended to have drag-and-drop support by the google-dnd project.
The level
of drag-and-drop available in this library, in fact, is the best I
have ever
seen in a javascript library.
http://code.google.com/p/gwt-dnd/
A good example of the drag-and-drop in action is here - there are 13
different demo scenarios where they show it being used.
http://allen-sauer.com/com.allen_sauer.gwt.dnd.demo.DragDropDemo/
DragDropDemo.html
What is good about that examples page, is that you can view the
java source
that is generating that page. When you see the java code you would
write to
implement that kind of functionality, you can see why I like GWT...
You can design a java server side layer of services (json, rest, ws)
separeted from the client side (view) layer and create an ajax
communication
layer (maybe comet!)You can do this with GWT also - I just
suggested the
servlet approach since it's incredibly easy. You can do GWT stuff
as a pure
client-side approach and not even touch the server-side aspect of
it. Doing
so you still get the benefit of writing your client code in Java and
debugging it in Java.
The code is very clean, readable and compactYou can make GWT
export code in
a "readable" way - which produces small readable code that closely
resembles
the java code. For production, you use the "obfuscated mode" which
cranks it
down to incredibly optimized code that loads fast and runs fast.
In any case, if you have never had a chance to play with GWT - you
should
really take it for a spin. It does take a few hours (maybe one
afternoon?)
to understand how exactly the pieces work together - but once you
dive in
and play with it a bit, it's really easy to use. If you have
IntelliJ 7 -
you can use the GWT Studio to make a "GWT Sample App" that has a
simple
Hello World project to play with as a starting point.
Ryan
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