I have a project with a Java backend and Angular-based frontend and I'd like to utilize Django-cms. Is this possible to do with a non-Django project? I've been looking over the documentation, but I can't find an explicit 'yes' or 'no'. I can't wrap my head around how I'd integrate, what seem to me, two very different projects.
No, it's not possible.
django CMS is a standard Django application, that requires a standard kind of Django environment. It can't do anything except as part of a Django project.
There's nothing to stop you configuring your web server so that some requests (by URL) go to the Django project while the others are handled by the Java backend, but this isn't integration, it's simply some form of wholly independent co-existence.
Related
I am starting my career in programming and I have being trying to learn as much as I can, specially in "new" technologies as Angular 2+, although I like a lot more working on the back-end.
I am currently working in a company that has 4 main applications all running using Java EE 7 in a JBoss application server. The applications have a user interface with is currently based in Java Server Pages (JSP) and Java Server Faces (JSF) (mainly using PrimeFaces framework). My project is related to the migration of the User Interface from those "horrible" xhtml JSF pages to something like Angular 6+.
Needless to say that this this transition should happen with minimum changes to the back end. However, in the way the Back end was originally conceived, the back end is not RESTful (no REST API). So, it is all based on Beans, which makes the back end to be closely tight to the front end, making scalebility an issue.
All that being said, considering that creating such RESTful service, although not completely off the table, is not an option now, I have the following questions:
1) Is it possible to 'feed' the data to my Angular UI using a JSP !? I did some research on the topic, and it seems it is somehow possible.
2) Considering it is possible to use the JSP pages, how much of Angular "great tools and functionality" I would loose in this process (routing, two-way-binding, service injection, etc)?
It would be great to have some unbiased opinion, since I know where the people at my company stand on that issue (they would prefer to not spending the time creating the REST API at this time) and I know where I stand (I would rather create the service, since it would be a great learning oportunity for me). Still, facing the challenges of a real world application, I would like to know the community opinion.
Thank you for the help,
biased opinion, even though you asked for a non biased one
I'm not an authority on JSP, but from what I know, these are server side templates rendered on the backend. If this is the case then you cannot use this with angular. Maybe you can make it work somehow by extending the webpack config and custom plugins which load the .jsp files, but you will definitely lose either the AOT performance from angular or the dynamic nature from JSP. And besides that, angular is moving to all AOT anyways.
My suggestion is the same as yours, write a RESTful service. It shouldn't take too long, because the requests/responses are already available. Just make sure to follow to correct REST guidelines.
Then create the angular app based on the templates from jsp. I suppose you can copy these one on one, and change the syntax from jsp to angular, and obtain the necessary data from the REST api and populate these in your template
I just develop a tool with my classmates and we want to use Vue.js as Web interface.
For Description what we programmed. We developed a Java EE web application in Eclipse. We use Tomcat 7 as web server. I search a long time and i found nothing.
Vue.js is a javascript front-end framework. There is nothing to stop you from using that with a middle-layer/back-end technology like Java EE.
In your HTML pages(or JSP) just include the Vue.js file as mentioned in the documentation, and other .js files that you create as part of your vue.js frontend application.
The library can then interface with any HTTP-based backend methods that you expose (using Servlets, Controllers, etc.) depending on how your Java EE project is structured and what frameworks it uses.
While investigating the same question, I found this good blog that has a git repository too
https://blog.codecentric.de/en/2018/04/spring-boot-vuejs/
From a glance it looks like a read solid implementation, however it has some sticky setup i haven't come across before.
It dose however seem like a professional and scalable solution i will definitely
give a try.
https://github.com/jonashackt/spring-boot-vuejs
Thankyou 04/24/18 by Jonas Hecht
For sure you can.
Your java application, which is your "backend", has to expose its functionalities as Web services (REST Json WS should be the easiest for what you are trying to do).
To expose your services as Web services, you need to find the easiest framework fitting your need. You will probably need to dive into Maven if you haven't yet, because these frameworks tend to have tons of dependencies.
Your Vue.js interface will make calls to the backend via HTTP requests each time necessary (get a resource, update a resource, ...).
I have always been a front-end Java programmer, sometimes had to do C# on .NET but for the most part, Java is probably all I know about.
Just currently I have to do a small-scale website doing extremely simple thing and I really don't know where to start. My HTML skill is probably as good as I am with XML on Android, which is fair to say far less complicated than the HTML source code modern website have. I have almost no experience with PHP either, and no strong background on building or managing a database.
Is there some sort of technology that builds fully working website using mainly Java? It may have other languages I have to familiarize with but for the most part, I'd like to have little learning curve. For the backend I'm very sure I'm going to use cloud server services like Azure or Parse.
This is a very special project of me so I can't let anyone code it rather than me and myself only. Thank you and have a good day.
Use Servlets and JSPs for web development it's a start point and then java webservices as you already know XML.
I suggest you to build all your front-end using the following set of technologies: HTML5, AngularJS, JQuery, javascript, bootstrap. Your backend could exchange json with the front-end. The Bootstrap is the base for all your website and you could get a free template from the web itself, which would severely reduce your hard work at web designing. You would need just to adapt the links and calls, and the AngularJS would handle the controller and other stuffs ( have a chance to learn about ). Some JQuery components, or even AngularJS components would enhance your system usability and combined with javascript would bring most of hard work to front-end. I had the chance do start a system from zero and this is what I did, and now I have an AngularJS app working together with java by having java on the backend ( spring, hibernate, etc ) receiving and providing json data. At github you find some angularjs seed examples which you could use in your app and, again, save time and effort.
My apologies in advance, My answer is a bit broader in scope,
The Best Development Model for developing any website regardless of your language choice in Azure App Service is to take advantage two powerful features offered by Azure App Service, the Continuous Deployment feature and Deployment slots.
Start your website on a git repository and you may have node modules or bower packages, but on build your git will crunch it down to a working website with proper gulp files. Check out this blog to understand the process.
Once you have the git repo working for a simple website, your development process becomes much smoother. You can commit a change and Continuous deployment will automatically start a deployment for you to get your latest bits into your web app.. Check this blog for more details on Continuous Deployment.
You can use deployment slots to stage your changes and swap to maintain multiple versions of your web app on the cloud to easily build a production level application that has a last known good state. Check this blog for more details on Deployment slots.
The two features are the most used features while developing, deploying and servicing any project I work and I have found them very useful to understand them and use them in all their glory.
I am not a Java developer, but from the your question I can see you are looking to start on web development, the quick and powerful way (purely subjective here :D) is to use Asp.Net 5 with Angular 2 Beta. Here is an end to end tutorial on how to setup a development environment. Asp.Net 5 should be friendly toward Java developers as it is very light weight and simple to use and works great with vscode and visual studio community edition.
Let me know if the long answer helped, if you need a pure java environment that should be possible too :).
We currently have a 2-tier Java Swing application sitting on top of MS SQL Server 2005. All the business logic is in the database. The client is quite old (and not very friendly), and for reasons of performance and scalability, we've already started porting some services to a middle tier in Java.
However, we still have a number of short and long term goals:
Pick a technology stack for a new front-end
This isn't easy - I can see everything from a web app at one end of the continuum to a traditional desktop app at the other being viable choices. The current front-end isn't really complex (mostly form-based), so I can see web/AJAX fitting, but it's an area where we don't know what we don't know.
Stacks on my list are:
Eclipse RCP, Netbeans RCP
Flex/Flash, Silverlight, JavaFX
Pure Javascript frontends (Sprout Core, Javascript MVC, ...)
Java-based Web frameworks (Wicket, JSF, ...)
Find a way of making the current application perform acceptably in a remote situation
We have some clients who resale our app to smaller clients and need to be able to remotely deploy it. Due to the 2-tier nature of the current architecture this leads to terrible performance (for example, calling a stored procedure that returns 18 result sets). We've used a Citrix solution in the past, but no-one likes that approach. Tunneling JDBC through port 80 also sounds like a bad idea. I was starting to wonder if there's anything that could use a X-Windows like approach to remote just the GUI part.
To simplify development and leverage your experience in Swing consider using Vaadin for your frontend. It is a Java framework for building modern web applications that look great, and perform well. All the code is written in Java and looks very similar to Swing.
As far as overall application architecture I would advise multi-tier, service oriented architecture. The best way to do it is by using Spring framework with Hibernate for database access.
If you want to easily redeploy your application, for an update, security reasons, etc. and if you want your application to be it to be accessed remotely, you should really consider a web based front end.
Plus, this way, only one app, your web app, will handle connection to the database, so no JDBC tunneling or whatever.
Concerning the best framework, it depends on your team knowledge, the way your application will be used (more or less javascript), etc.
We've just gone through a very similar evaluation process as we're migrating a legacy application.
For us the biggest deciding factor in what front-end framework to use was the prior knowledge of the development team. We wanted something that everybody would be comfortable with immediately. We had a couple of the senior developers that have worked with X or Y, but the framework that everybody knew was Swing.
In the end we decided on the NetBeans platform using RESTful webservice to communicate with an EE server.
As a bonus you can get your NetBeans platform application to deploy as a Java WebStart application, which means you get the benefit of not having to worry about individual installations.
If the frontend is mostly form-based, I would stay away from Flex. Flex is great for some applications (I'm using it for a canvas based application), but the form components of Flex has some usability issues. They just don't work like you expect from todays web. (like missing support for mousewheel, typing in dropdownlist only take first character into account etc.)
Assuming that you are going to force all your clients to install a new middle tier, I can't think of an argument against making it a Java web app. As already mentioned you have the benefit of controlling all access into your platform over HTTP, which allows easy resale, just with firewall configuration. There's no reason you can't make use of Javascript within a web front end, you may be interested in DWR, which allows you to interact directly with Java objects via Javascript. I've used this before to add some simple Ajax interaction to a Spring MVC webapp.
The reasons I like this approach, you're already migrating code into Java middle tier, so
Already imposing Java server hardware cost on clients, hosting app server / web server is comparable
Already have Java expertise, can be leveraged with DWR
Can use as much/little Javascript as appropriate (I've used DWR with IE6, Firefox 3, Chrome)
I think you're right to be wary of pushing too much functionality to the client, I'd go for as thin a client as possible. The only reason I'd look at the first two stack choices would be if you have some developer expertise in a particular area, and not Java webapp/Javascript.
I'd suggest to create a short list of candidate frameworks and create a small test application with all of them. This way you will get a sense of good and bad aspects from all of them and also get a picture what the community activity and documentation is like for each project (there is a lot of variance on those).If you end up doing this I hope you'll include Vaadin in your short list, I think it would fit you very well. If you have any questions just come over to our forums and we'll help you to get started.
If you have a Java based web application (J2EE webapp - never mind which other underlying frameworks are being used), and you wanted to introduce a Flash based front-end, would you use Laszlo or would you rather expose a ReST-like XML interface and build and deploy a Flash application that uses that?
On one hand, Laszlo is quite amazing - doing for Flash what JSP does for HTML. It is easy to work with. It fits in very well with the rest of the web application (which is JSP based).
On the other hand it might be better to develop a complete Flash app decoupled from the server and use an XML-over-HTTP mechanism to bind the two. This would have the added advantage of being able to use the same XML interface for an AJAX front end if needed.
What would you do, and why?
I would create the contract-first services, deploy them separately, and then write the RIA client to access them.
Coming up with the schema first has the added benefit of completely decoupling the two during development. The RIA developer can create some synthetic XML streams to use for data while waiting for the services to come on-line.
I might have considered Laszlo in the past, but today, I'd stay within the Java stack and use JavaFX.
Laszlo is the product that never made it, there isn't a big enough ecosystem of developers around it.
I'd use Adobe Flex for the front end. The same benefits of using a markup language for doing flash, but it has a much larger developer base and open source projects to draw upon. For the data communication, use either REST or if you want to get clever, use BlazeDS.
OpenLaszlo is a complete RIA framework, so I'm pretty sure that you can 'compile' it to a completely standalone app that communicates with the server over HTTP. It's really very similar to Flex. The advantage Flex has is a much bigger community, a full-blown IDE, and more resources (Adobe), while OpenLaszlo is a little more innovative in that you can deploy to Flash or AJAX from one codebase.
I've actually spent some time working on a implementation similar to what you're suggesting. I had a complied Open Laszlo front end embedded in a web page with a Django (a python MVC library) REST interface on the backend and no Open Laszlo server. It works reasonably well, but there are a couple of things to watch out for. Open Laszlo only supports calls to GET and POST, so you won't be able to easily use the DELETE and PUT methods in your REST API. The other is the lack of community around Laszlo (as mentioned elsewhere). I can sometimes be frustratingly difficult to answer some basic questions when using Laszlo, particularly around the XML HTTP API and XML replication features in the framework. I personally never really looked at the Laszlo back end server seriously as I wanted an open API that could be consumed easily by other clients.
All this being said, the implementation does work and can be effective if you're willing to work around the limitations mentioned above. Plus Open Laszlo is free, which can be a really big plus if your working on a budget.