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Closed 9 years ago.
I start to migrate an old Swing app to web interface:
Alternatives I want :
Gwt, Vaadin,Smart Gwt, Ext Gwt
The profile of the app is a custom ERP.
Big question is which ?
Why GWT do not have rich components like Vaadin ,SmartGwt and ExtGwt has ?
DO you know any GWT component library ?
Thanks.
Well, I don't think there is a definite answer for this one. I started about 2 years ago with all this web-dev maze and I have theses conclusions:
GWT: This framework is really all about abstracting you from the "real" web development. The framework has evolved a lot since I use it. It has gotten better and they are continually introducing interesting new concepts and options for you to build your app. They leave a hole lot of freedom to the dev. This can be a good thing since it can be nice to choose components you already know. Say you know JQuery, they have GQuery, you know Hibernate you can use it, Spring you can use it. But, to much freedom is kind of daunting for GWT beginners since it's hard to plug all the components to get an enterprise application. Is it that hard? Not really you get used to it's concepts and start liking it. As far as Widget goes, they do not offer as many eye candy stuff as Vaadin, gxt or Smart but I like to stick with the bases.
Smart: I used SmartGWT for enterprise level projets and it does the job. It has many great components that will get you where you want. It is a huge framework though and it gets complex when something doesn't work as you expected. But, you could be happy with it. It gets a bit hard to use layouts sometimes.
GXT: Really nice. They offer a lot of great widgets, yes. They offer good support, yes. You have to pay :( yes. Unless you are an Open source project, you will have to pay fees to use it. The baseline is, I abandoned it until they release the version 3.0. Why? They are syncing with GWT roadmap. They will be using the same event handling and UI binders. I'm waiting for this to ease my dev. time. Sometimes you also want to mix (which might not be the greatest idea) but the event model being different from the GWT one is pretty crappy.
Bottom line, I sticking with GWT for now. They will continue enhancing it and the support community is great! But you won't get a savvy UI which you could get with any of the frameworks.
good luck
Related
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Closed 9 years ago.
I have some questions from UI folks #java technology
I have recently switched from php to java domain. Though I have good experience in front end theming work with CMS application driven by php.
Since, know i am very new to spring framework, and have developed an understanding with jsp files for the UI aspect.
If you may recommend, assist me or give suggestions... what best design ui practices can be followed to make the design live as consistent looking organism in the enterprise level application.
right now, bootstrap is css framework of choice...and is well adopted into application.
Sharing some details, though I find it very challenging to teach the java developers, the aspect of ui design... apart from their primary task of coding, building the logic from product owner requirements and UI inputs from wireframe screen...
as they are not visually inclined to 'pixel' based aesthetics... i have found interface does not come out well at places...and do not look very polished
and since there is resource crunch of good UI/UX foks who can solve their problems and apart from coding the best interaction in the application, new features ...blah etc.
Though, have started to train them slowly, repeatedly and steadily...on teaching them on how to reuse your css code, write efficient styles and to attain the level of well aligned and well thought placed pixels on screen/viewport.
What best or any training module i can bring on, so that they become self sufficient... for e.g. have been done also
http://slid.es/gauravmishr/introduction-to-css-for-jsp-developers
Will like to know your recommendation and thoughts, so that design scalability can be achieved.
Over to java ui/ux gurus :- )
maybe you should give Asual's Summer a try. It is a presentation layer library for Spring MVC. It allows you to reference resources from jars and thus makes modularization really easy. Most importantly for me, you write simple html5 with some custom tags and el expressions instead of JSPs. It also has support for resource caching and compression. Finally, you can prepare html templates to include in your views, thus increasing core reusability. I have used it extensively with twitter bootstrap and it works great.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I want to make Dynamic UI for a desktop application. I am planning to make it in JavaFX.
Is it a good choice?
Second thing I want to know is that is it possible to have UI by JavaFx and behind the scene major work in done by pure java? I am totally new in JavaFX so correct me if I am wrong.
Also If I am wrong tell me other possibilities for the Dynamic UI and java code behind for a standalone application.
Having JavaFX 2 UI and pure Java background is valid and usual approach.
There is a good example in this question: JavaFX in enterprise web applications - good alternative to classic web pages?
There's also Swing, SWT, and the Eclipse and NetBeans RCP platforms.
Whether or not JavaFX is a "good" choice, that's more opinion than fact. I wonder about its future. Personally, I like a lot of what's available in Swing combined with a nicer language than Java, like Groovy, JRuby, etc. In an enterprise environment, purchasing a LaF seems a reasonable option.
Yes, JavaFX allows re-use of existing Java libraries; integrating existing code was a design goal.
If creating a desktop application with JavaFX is a good choise or not,... I can't tell you. Even the future of JavaFX is unclear. Despite this, it really depends on your aims and requirements (e.g. target audience, maintenance, ...). Maybe, your question has to be more specific. But, if you are your only customer then 'happy coding' with JavaFX :)
Some hints that might help you getting started:
Separation of concerns
To separate UI from all the other stuff is always of high value. A major key is the Separation of concerns. Starting with this article is a good starting point.
Design Patterns
The next step is to decide for a design pattern enabling to separate presentation from the processing of data. Personally, I'm a fan of the Presentation Model. There are many other patterns out there and I'm sure you'll find the one, fitting your requirements. So it is possible - and always a good approach - to use e.g. JavaFX for UI and pure Java for all the other stuff.
Hope this helps.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I've been looking into JGoodies for the last two hours and i don't seem to find a lot of good documentation on the subject. Not even on the JGoodies website. So it made me wondering of JGoodies is a good framework to use to model your gui?
Is there some good documentation on how to get started I haven't found yet?
Thanks in advance.
Well, i don't think it is complicated at all, considering the Head Aches while using other standard layouts from swing.
Keep these tips in mind
JGoodies forms is a powerful layout, what you envision is what you get, unlike others
http://www.jgoodies.com/downloads/articles-and-presentations/ kindly read articles here, 2hours of your research isn't enough.
When using JGoodies forms enable debug mode, to see what exactly you are doing.
Learning curve for most foundation classes are steep it will take time change the gear.
I'm just on a project that uses JGoodies for the UI and the only thing I can say is that it is very complicated and hard to use. I'm sure it's a powerful framework, but the documentation is not very well described and the framework complexity is just to hard to understand. I'm considering to switch to another framework...
It's just that it's not worth the pain, you wont get anything special from it, except headache..
I assume you're referring to JGoodies Binding (and optionally Validation). Yes, it's a good framework. However, there's definitely a learning curve, and it's more suited for larger projects where you need to keep your code modular.
To learn more:
Martin Fowler on the Presentation Model architecture.
Another article that's helpful for understanding Presentation Model.
Tutorial code samples in the older versions in the download archive (unzip, browse to src/tutorial). Documentation is also included in the packages.
Read the articles on the JGoodies site, as alfadx mentioned.
As for JGoodies FormLayout, it's better than the default layout managers, but I think MiG Layout is better. I recommend WindowBuilder for GUI work.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I'm starting my thesis on Agents and Smart Objects interaction and I'd like to know what's in the future for JADE, the Java Agent framework. I find the whole concept of agents, programmable behaviors, federations and their help in solving Artificial Intelligence problems very interesting but will it always be an academic field, like Haskell? What's being done with JADE?
I created a system for my PhD - using JADE as the framework - where agents played music with human musicians. There's a bit of a write up (and a link to the thesis) at http://www.mo-seph.com/academic/musicalagents
In the end, I didn't use a lot of JADE, and found it quite heavyweight for the kind of work I was doing. The communications library was useful (if a bit hard work) and the message queuing side of it worked OK. However, I quickly found that most of the behaviour I wanted to implement needed to be so heavily customised that the JADE framework only really supported the transfer of information.
I think the usefulness of the framework depends hugely on what the question is. It seems that a lot of the usefulness of JADE was around it's links to the FIPA agent communication languages (http://www.fipa.org/) and the communications infrastructure in general. If that's what you're interested in, then it might be quite useful. If you're more concerned with the intelligence in individual agents, it might be a useful framework, but it won't help much with the design of the intelligence.
Systems like JADE, Aglets etc. are "containers" as opposed to libraries.
This means that if you want to use some aspects of code mobility/mobile objects/mobile agents in your application, you basically have to design your application around these frameworks. I think this limits the applicability quite a bit.
Personally I think the ability to send mobile objects/mobile agents to remote machines is generally quite useful though. It's a very powerful idea and has applications for sure in grid computing, but also applications in areas where RPC is used right now.
So given this idea I wrote Mobility-RPC which is a way to avail of code mobility in any application, much like you would use RPC.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I've recently heard about Apache Pivot being moved to the Top Level Projects category and I was wondering who has tried the most recent version and compared it to other RIA tools. What are the proper categories for comparison?
It seems to be easier to pick up for Java developers since JavaFX has a different scripting language. The Pivot developers say that Pivot is what Sun should have made instead of JavaFX.
Good to hear from you. :-) I agree that we tend to focus more on applet deployment in Pivot's design. However, there is nothing inherent in the platform that prevents an application from using multiple top-level windows. It's just not something we cater to since it isn't relevant to our primary use case (which, as you noted, is browser deployment). Note that it is also not possible to create multiple top-level windows in Flex or Silverlight.
Re: "who is creating applets these days?" - it's not so much about creating applets as it is about creating RIAs. If you ask the question, "who is creating RIAs?", I think the answer would be "a lot of people". Pivot simply allows developers to build RIAs in Java (rather than ActionScript, for example).
Greg
I worked with Pivot and even been part of Pivot development. It is a nice little library, but...
It cannot replace Swing or JavaFX. The original authors are positioning it to compete with Adobe Flex. Because of that its concepts are more like applet than desktop application. It is almost impossible to create a modern desktop application simply because it has a concept of one main window and all the child windows are "inside" of it. I discussed this with authors but it looks like this is the way they want to go.
The library uses its own custom collections library which is sort of strange, but it isn't a show stopper.
Other then that the library is nice. But who is creating applets these days?
Well, I checked pivot 1.4. You can have sub-windows.
Oracle/Sun is putting a lot of effort into promoting JavaFX but it seems to me that all the layout feature etc from swing are gone in profits to some multi-media stuff. Right now FX and business applications are two things very far from each other.
For business RIA application, my first impression is that Pivot is much better designed than FX.
Pivot provides a lot: binding, easy web service, nice design, xml definition of UI... - Yes a lot to consider for a Java developer.
Not perfect but looking at what they have accomplished these last 6 months... impressive!
If you are intereseted in the statistic view -
I compare through 'google trends' between JavaFx to 'Apache Pivot'
and looks like there is no competition - JavaFx lead in a rate that is close to 1 to 0
so it gives perspective about the standard of the industry towards those frameworks.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=apache+pivot%2C+javafx&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=1