My goal is to implement web based editor for evaluation nets (extension of Petri nets), something like that swing app, language - Java. However I've never implemented rich web applications like that, so I am searching for the proper toolkit now. Currently I am thinking about GWT, but, as far as I have no expirience with it, I want to consider another options too. Hoping for your advice.
Thanks in advance ;)
There are a number of alternative options:
Vaadin is my favourite. you can build a web GUI without having to know javascript at all in the same manner you build a swing desktop application. Have a look at its demo. vaadin comes with a professional look so it is easy to build something that look good.
Vaadin stores its backing GUI objects in session so if client idle for longer than the seestion timeout, they will have to refresh the application.
Another one similar to Vaadin is Apache Wicket.
Related
As Java developer, I always felt comfortable developing web applications using GWT, but every now and then I am trying to check if there is a better framework that I can use for developing a large scale web application.
I tried out React, and I liked it, but as a Java developer I am not feeling as comfortable developing using JS, and I am scared that when the project will become really big I will have troubles maintaining it, and I will get "spaghetti code".
Basically I wanted to know what are the benefits of React over GWT? and am I right to be scared of big scale projects developed in JS?
Now you could try VueGWT: Github project
The idea is to write your control in Java and your views with vueJS templates. We have started (only a few part for now) to use it for GenMyModel, a very big GWT application.
I'm a java born developper who now works in react-redux and miss the object language. If you try to develop a real good application you will have to add redux to react but its pattern is quite weird and not well documented.
If you feel more comfortable with Java than JS you should use GWT. It's true that ag-grid with infinite loading for example, may not exist in GWT for the moment but you have Google support. If you want the latest amazing widgets (the react virtualized select is another example) for your app and you really need them you will have to document yourself about these (with lacks of documentation) and use react.
I am in a serious confusion since this morning after the project meeting .. I am very much new to java, I have worked as Application Supporter before, but java seriously ruffled my mind.
My Question: I am developing a web based application using Servelts/MYSQL, and my boss wants me to develop another application which was already developed before and he has lost the code, I have to develop that app again, But I don't want to use servlets for my 2nd project.. I think I can do that application using Swing or GWT, or AJAX, now that problem is have to integrate my application with my first application. How to covert Swing application to Servlet app, I am worried a bit. Your help and suggestions will be appreciated.
You can't convert a Swing application to a web application, at least not in an easy way.
An option would be to create your 2nd application as an Applet, that way you could use Swing and you could integrate it fairly easily into your web application.
There is another option:
Deploy and run Java Swing applications in browser by automatically converting them to HTML/JavaScript.
This is however not a free service/solution and I can't give further advice on this.
But since you have to rewrite the 2nd app from start (which you wanted to do using Swing), you'd better do that as a webapp as well, and then you will have no problem integrating it into your first application.
GWT is already very similar to Swing (you can create GWT apps mostly using Java code, it uses components called widgets, panels, events and event handlers) so if you create your webapp using Google GWT, it will be easy to do your 2nd app too.
i am planning to develop desktop application using java code, and wanted to use any ready
made framework and then i got know about eclipse RCP / eclipse scout but i am in doubt that which framework should i use whether eclipse rcp or eclipse scout ? could somebody suggest me please.
first of all I'd like to add another option: Eclipse Riena.
Eclipse Riena is comparable to Eclipse Scout as it is based on Eclipse RCP and provides some useful abstractions. You should have a look at it.
But to give you some help deciding which one to use:
If you are doing your first steps in Eclipse RCP, I would suggest that you first get your hands dirty with a little bit of plain Eclipse RCP. There is some complexity which will get back to you if just start with a higher level framework like Scout/Riena.
Depending on plans with your desktop application, this might already be good enough.
Scout/Riena do help you with more advanced topics like reuse/standardization, remoting, proven application architecture. But like most frameworks, you lose some flexibility.
What I especially like about Eclipse Riena:
Focus on easy to use GUI (will not fit for every project)
Abstraction over SWT/JFace (Ridgets) provides nice facility for controller tests, rendering the need for GUI tests to a minimum
Nice API to (dynamically ) structure and validate your application
Simplify remoting (no Java EE container dependencies on the client)
You can use parts of Riena independently. Say you can use the ridgets without adding the whole bunch of other perhaps not needed stuff.
What I like about Eclipse Scout
Strong focus on integration in Java EE environment
Wizards all over: Quite simple to create a first and second shot of your GUI
Supports swap of your GUI technology: You can move from SWT to Swing quite swiftly, though I wouldn't bet that is easy for a large application. ;)
HTH
Regards,
Holger
I can't comment/judge about your comments regarding Riena. However, I'd like to add some comments/clarifications regarding Scout
The fact that Scout comes with the Scout SDK tooling is a big help to beginners. This makes it ideal to get started with writing desktop applications. As the output of all the wizards is only Java code and some needed wiring in plugin.xml etc. it means that you're free to do Scout applications without using the Scout SDK (you can even have mixed teams working on the same code). This is possible as the Scout application model is just a bunch of Java classes.
Holger rightly mentions that you can swap the UI technology with Scout applications. This is possible as the programmers writes the model of the UI. For each supported UI technology (currently Swing, SWT, RAP (for web applications)) a specific plugin will actually draw the UI depending on the available UI model. This is a very clean separation of the UI technology and the application model. Therefore swapping works even for very large applications (Of course there are some exceptions to this rule: If your desktop application has some Microsoft Office integration part on the client side you will find it hard to support that in a web application).
Try some of the Scout tutorials and let us know what you think in the forum.
Best regards
Matthias
I'm working on a swing application. I don't want to migrate it to SWT, but I'd like to use some benefits of Eclipse RCP application. Especially, I want to use the update technology to distribute application updates.
It would be great if you knew a tutorial on how to build an Eclipse RCP application that can start a custom GUI based on Swing.
Uhm... I don't think you'll be able to get there with the eclipse rcp...
There's a lot you'd have to adopt, including the whole OSGI structure for your app -- if you're unwilling to change your UI toolkit you've probably already got too much infrastructure in place to want to adopt that much of the RCP.
If it's just swing your married too for whatever reason, look into the netbeans rcp.
If it's just updating you want... there's more then 1 sparkle implementation for java.
Check this:
http://www.eclipse.org/articles/article.php?file=Article-Swing-SWT-Integration/index.html
However, I strongly advise against using them. You will end up with a lot of issues with platform independence. If you're just aiming at Windows, you might be fine.
I agree with lscoughlin, you're getting way too much overhead for that bit of functionality. You can always try to take the bits you need out of the Eclipse/Equinox project, thereby building a leaner solution. Be aware of licensing then. Looking at some parts of the code for inspiration can be helpful too, but it's a huge project.
Tough task... but you can try qwylt.
It is a framework based on Equinox (Eclipse OSGi implementation). Hopefully it will provide enough functionality for you.
Generally your request could be realized with the new Eclipse 4. In the new model all graphical output is done with so called Renderers which render the application model into the grapical output you see with your application. Lars Vogel has a Tutorial on those and Kai Tödter even did a brief article on different renderers in JavaFX 2.0, Swing & SWT Renderers for the Eclipse 4.x Application Platform.
He also did a basic SWING renderer which is available on https://github.com/toedter/e4-rendering I can however not tell on how stable this renderer is and to what extent it covers all application model elements provided by e4.
I am going to create a Java EE based project, in which lots of GUI work is involved, like creating tree and drag and drop of objects (like routers and switch) kind of thinks.
I would like to know if there is any open source available, with whom I can do rapid Java EE GUI development.
The JBoss Seam framework allows you to generate a whole application.
With JPA,EJB and JSF for presentation layer, You can choose between Icefaces and Richfaces as JSF component library, both support trees as well as drag and drop.
Java EE itself doesn't really address this kind of UI activity. If you're thinking about drawing a network diagram and dragging and dropping items on a canvas then that's happening in the client, perhaps a browser. Java EE is pretty much a server-side framework, great for dealing with databases, queues and other enterprise connectivity, munging data and rendering HTML.
For traditional form-based UIs extension such as JSF give you lots of nice widgets for trees and other such UI structures but doesn't attack a "drawing" application.
A few years back when worked on an application of the kind I'm guessing you're thinking about, we used JavaScript/Dojo in the Browser to render the UI and Java EE on the server, but we did a lot of manual coding - I don't know whether these days there are better frameworks. I'd recommend exploring client-side UI technologies to use in conjun ction with your Java EE server-side stuff.
I would suggest ICEfaces which is an implementation of JSF but process all requests via AJAX. It also support drag and drop feature and other components just like desktop gui such as treeview, datagrid, radio buttons, combobox, menu, richtext box, process bar..., check out its components here: http://component-showcase.icefaces.org/component-showcase/showcase.iface
Checkout Grails, which brings the speed of development known from Ruby on Rails to the JVM.
For trees, drag and drop etc, I would use one of the many JavaScript frameworks, like Dojo, Prototype+Scriptaculous, jQuery+jQueryUI+plugins, YUI3 etc.