I'm building a web app with Backbone.js (I'm not tied to Backbone yet though). I need a back-end framework only for persistence to a database via a RESTful API. However, I also need to able to deploy it as a 'desktop' app for off-line use, i.e. running a local server and launching a browser window, but I don't want users to have to start a server from the command line to run the application.
I can use SQLite as a database since it's only a single user application, it's just the framework that I'm stuck on. I have looked at the following:
Rails and Django: Default web servers are too flimsy, requires Ruby/Python and runs from the command line. I'm aware of the Bitnami stacks but at 99mb it's too big of a dependency and not exactly hidden from the user.
Sproutcore: Run from command line, also too bulky.
Pyjamas Desktop - Depends on MSHTML which I suspect limits my ability to use HTML5 features.
I'm leaning towards creating a Java app that starts a Scala/Lift server instance and opens a web browser, then sits in the system tray (kind of like WAMP). Is anyone familiar with a tool or framework built for user-friendly deployment as a standalone desktop app?
I do not know if PHP is an option for you? Then I would recommend phpdock.
web2py has a standalone deploy-to-desktop feature with no dependency on Python: http://web2py.com/books/default/chapter/29/14#How-to-distribute-your-applications-as-binaries
As Eydun said, phpdock is an option but it's commercially licensed .
I settled on using Java/Spring/H2/Hibernate/Jetty. I find that Jetty serves requests VERY quickly so the application looks real-time when launched in a browser. There is a tutorial on embedding the Jetty server here. I imagine it's quite trivial to build a GUI that launches the server and a browser.
Another Java option is to use the Play Framework, which may be more at home to those coming from a Django/Rails background. However, the documentation for "creating a standalone version of your application" for Play 2.0+ indicates that they have ditched using Java EE containers (Tomcat/Jetty) and WAR files in favor of running the JARs with the bundled copy of JBoss Netty, so it may take a bit of work to get it running the way you want it.
I would recommend the Play Framework approach if you're OK with using/learning Scala.
Related
I have developed a Scala/Play webapp and now I am trying to deploy it on production.
What is the recommended "best way" of doing that?
The documentation mentions only runnig it from play console, which does not seem very robust (in case of machine restarts etc).
There are apporaches to wrap the app into a war file and deploy on Tomcat7 (e.g. play2war), but they do not seem to be actively developed (e.g. there is only beta support for 2.3, the plugin is not available from maven repo etc).
What is the right way of doing this?
If you host the application on Windows then take a look at Yet Another Java Service Wrapper which wraps the application in a Windows service that will keep it running, even after restarts.
If you run it on Linux then take a look at Supervisord and Monit, which monitors the application and starts, restarts and stops it when needed.
See the following links for tutorials:
How do I run a Play Framework 2.0 application as a Windows service?
http://marcovanduijn.blogspot.nl/2011/08/run-play-framework-application-as.html
http://blog.fgribreau.com/2013/09/how-to-make-play-framework-2-work-with.html
Is there anyone that has done a java interpreter using groovy-all jar file? Maybe sample or example can share it to me or teach me? I meant a interpreter that can parse string(java code) into the textarea and output it as a result like(hello world)
As you need some sample code to implement a web-console using groovy-all.jar, it would strongly recommend taking a look at Groovy Web Console.
Although it's not exactly a Java EE / Tomcat app and it is fairly similar as its a standard Java Servlets API 2.5 based web app. It runs on Google App Engine, which you can try out here. All you need from it is the script execution logic which for most of the part is not app engine specific. Keep in mind, it has dependencies on GAE Apis (through Gaelyk) so you should prune that part out of it to run in it outside Google App Engine.
I have a GWT project that contains both the GWT UI and the server backend. The server backend contains the Java GWT Services that are exposed via GWT's RPC to the UI.
Since the project has grown quite a bit, with the backend requiring more and more time to start, I am considering moving the UI to a separate project, with the idea to run the backend in a separate VM. The backend is relatively stable, and it is the UI where we spent most time. With the two in separate VMs, we could work on the UI much more efficiently, since we would only reload the UI (in GWT development mode) and leave the backend running.
My question: Is it possible to configure the Google Eclipse Plugin in such a way that it runs the UI and backend in separate VMs and I can still use the GWT development mode?
The project uses GWT 2.4 and we will update to 2.5 as soon as it is out. We use Maven as the build system.
There are two things to consider:
You don't always have to reload the server - usually it's enough to just reload the browser page [*] For an overview of when to reload/restart, ... please see https://stackoverflow.com/a/6150736/291741
You can deploy to an external server. In an Eclipse Run Configuration, go to the Server tab, and uncheck "Run built-in server". This will disable the web server (default port 8888), but will still run the Code Server (default port 9997, see the GWT tab). Then just run your external server (e.g. Tomcat) on port 8888. It should serve the web content, and handle the servlet requests.
If you want to create a really cool fully automated Eclipse-JavaEE + GWT setup, with separate server-side redeploy on any server you like (even with two debugger instances, if you want), see https://stackoverflow.com/a/11700678/291741
[*] I know, there are certain situations, e.g. when changing Gin configuration or Validation annotations, where reloading the web page is unfortunately not enough. But in most cases it just works fine (as long as you run DevMode with "Run As...", not with "Debug As...") If you want to run with a debugger attached, then I'd recommend the external server solution, of course.
In fact, I'm trying to see which would be the best approach to achieve play framework native support on openshift.
Play has it's own http server developed with netty. Right now you can deploy a play application to openshift, but you have to deploy it as a war, in which case play uses Servlet Container wrapper.
Being able to deploy it as a netty application would allow us to use some advanced features, like asynchronuos request.
Openshift uses jboss, so this question would also involve which would be the recommended approach to deploy a netty application on a jboss server, using netty instead of the servlet container provided by jboss.
Here is request for providing play framework native support on openshift There's more info there, and if you like it you can also add your vote ;-)
Start with creating 'raw-0.1' application.
SSH into the server and
cd $OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR
download and install play into a directory here. $OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR is supposed to survive redeploys of your application.
Now you can disconnect from SSH.
Clone the application repository. In the repository, there is a file .openshift/actions_hooks/start. It's task is to start the application using a framework of your choice. The file will need to contain at least (from what I know about Play)
cd $OPENSHIFT_REPO_DIR
$OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/play-directroy/play run --http.port=$OPENSHIFT_INTERNAL_PORT --some-other-parameters
Important
You have to bind to $OPENSHIFT_INTERNAL_IP:$OPENSHIFT_INTERNAL_PORT. Trying to bind to different interface is not allowed, also most of the ports are blocked.
To create some sort of template, save the installation steps into .openshift/action_hooks/build file. Check if play is installed, if it is do nothing, if it's not, execute the installation process.
I love Heroku but I would prefer to develop in Scala rather than Ruby on Rails.
Does anyone know of any services like Heroku that work with Scala?
UPDATE: Heroku now officially supports Scala - see answers below for links
As of October 3rd 2011, Heroku officially supports Scala, Akka and sbt.
http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2011/10/3/scala/
Update
Heroku has just announced support for Java.
Update 2
Heroku has just announced support for Scala
Also
Check out Amazon Elastic Beanstalk.
To deploy Java applications using
Elastic Beanstalk, you simply:
Create your application as you
normally would using any editor or IDE
(e.g. Eclipse).
Package your
deployable code into a standard Java
Web Application Archive (WAR file).
Upload your WAR file to Elastic
Beanstalk using the AWS Management
Console, the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse,
the web service APIs, or the Command
Line Tools.
Deploy your application.
Behind the scenes, Elastic Beanstalk
handles the provisioning of a load
balancer and the deployment of your
WAR file to one or more EC2 instances
running the Apache Tomcat application
server.
Within a few minutes you will
be able to access your application at
a customized URL (e.g.
http://myapp.elasticbeanstalk.com/).
Once an application is running,
Elastic Beanstalk provides several
management features such as:
Easily deploy new application versions
to running environments (or rollback
to a previous version).
Access
built-in CloudWatch monitoring metrics
such as average CPU utilization,
request count, and average latency.
Receive e-mail notifications through
Amazon Simple Notification Service
when application health changes or
application servers are added or
removed.
Access Tomcat server log
files without needing to login to the
application servers.
Quickly restart
the application servers on all EC2
instances with a single command.
Another strong contender is Cloud Foundry. One of the nice features of Cloud Foundry is the ability to have a local version of "the cloud" running on your laptop so you can deploy and test offline.
I started working on the exact same thing as what you said a few weeks ago. I use Lift, which is a great framework and has a lot of potential, on top of Linux chroot environment.
I'm done with a demo version, but Linux chroot is not that stable (nor secure), so I'm now switching to FreeBSD jail on Amazon EC2, and hopefully it'll be done soon.
http://lifthub.net/
There are also other Java hosting environment including VMForce mentioned above.
If you are looking for a custom setup which also has the ease of deployment that heroku offers: http://dotcloud.com. They are invite only right now but I was given access in under three days. I am working on a Lift/MongoDB project there and it works well.
Off the top of my head, only VMForce comes to mind, but its not available yet. This will be a Java-oriented service, so that probably means you'll have to spend a wee bit of time figuring out how to package the app.
For more discussion, there was a debate about this in 2008.
I'm not entirely sure if it's really suitable or not, but people have deployed Scala applications to Google App Engine, for example http://mawson.wordpress.com/2009/04/10/first-steps-with-scala-on-google-app-engine/
Actually you can run scala on heroku right now. You don't believe it?
https://github.com/lstoll/heroku-playframework-scala
I'm not sure the tricks lstoll has used are legit but using the
new cedar platform where you can run custom processes and some
ingenious Gemfile hacking he has managed to bootstrap the Java
play platform into a process. Seems to work as he has a live
site running a test page.
Stax cloud service offers preconfigured lift project skeleton. Also, there is a tutorial on how to deploy lift project to appengine.