Eclipse RAP / RWT Standalone applications - Best design? - eclipse

I'm working on the design of an with RAP/RWT, working under Tomcat. I'm learning RAP now, and a couple of questions come to my mind.
My application has a backend that works continuously gathering data from certain sources. On the other hand I want to create a frontend (RWT standalone application, or RAP with workbench functionality, not decided yet) running as a webapp.
First question: should I keep the backend as a separate process, and let the frontend RAP application communicate somehow with it? Or can I integrate everything together in the RAP application? Integrating everything together leads to the second question.
Second question: how can I detect from within the RAP application, when is the browser window/tab holding my app, closed? I would like to do some resource cleanup when the user closes the graphical interface (i.e. closes the browser). I cannot find anything equivalent to ApplicationWorkbenchWindowAdvisor#preWindowShellClose in RWT standalone applications. Same to dected when the application is started. In general, are there callbacks to follow the webapp lifecycle in RWT standalone applications?
Thanks a lot for your help!

Regarding your first point: When you use EJBs, please be aware that you can only directly access Java EE contexts from the request thread. This is not a problem when you run in JEE_COMPATIBILITY mode, but in SWT_COMPATIBILITY mode you may need to access your EJBs through RWT.requestThreadExec( Runnable );.
As for your second question, the RAP server is currently not informed on browser closes. This issue is discussed in bug 284273 - Session kill mechanism on browser close. It is not yet implemented because IIRC we couldn't find a reliable method of doing so that works in all browsers.
You could implement your own solution using a) the JSExecutor to put some JavaScript on the client that sends a request on browser close, and b) a PhaseListener that listens to these requests and terminates the session.

(*) First: decoupling is always the best practice. I use RMI stubs for receive notifications from backend application (another RMI object or EJB beans).
MyEJBListener stub = UnicastRemoteObject.exportObject(new MyEJBListener(display, page,
manager, handlermanager), 0)
MyEJBClient client1 = MyEJBLocator.findEJBClient("abc");
client1.addListener(stub);
In the stub use something like
public void notify(Event event){
UICallBack.activate("stubthread");
Display..asyncExec(new Runnable() {
// update event info
});
}
(*) Second:the method WorkbenchWindowAdvisor#postWindowClose can help you?, and call somethig method form backend app.

Related

GWT: How to run code in the Backend automatically?

I understood that GWT apps are separated into Frontend and Backend code.
In the little example that I wrote the Backend operations (XXXServiceImpl) are alwyas triggered by the Frontend (button pressed, etc.).
Question: Is there a way to run code in the Backend automatically? An example would be some initialization stuff that's not triggered by the Frontend (preferably it would be only executed once, during startup of the web app).
Calls to the server do not have to be triggered by a user. When your web app launches, it can make a call like initialize() to the backend, which will tell your server-side code to run some initialization method once.
If this initialization process is not dependent on a single client instance, you can add a check to see if the initialization has been already done and skip it in this case.
Finally, you can run a simple servlet that you can trigger manually (or using a cron-job, deferred task, etc. - depends on your platform) when you deploy your code. The drawback here is that you have to remember to do it every time a new server instance is started.

Play 2.0 - Push current state of execution to page

So I currently have an application independent of Play which may take a long time in its execution.
I want to put a UI on top of it using Play where the application may be invoked and to display some of the details of the execution inside of the application to the user. I would like the page to be updated automatically as the execution proceeds e.g. if a variable in the application increments this would be reflected on the page.
I'm not sure where to begin with this - do I need to split the application up into models + controllers ? Or do I just need to have code in a controller to instantiate the classes I have already coded and call the methods I need ?
What about constantly showing the execution state on the page?
Any resources I should know about/read ? Code examples?
Thanks
You may have already done so, but a good starting point is to create a skeleton Play application using the play new command, while referring the creating a new application section. You will have "views" (HTML template pages) and one controller (in Application.scala). You could add more controllers, but as you will have just a single page that should suffice.
You can add jars from your app (if it's a JVM app) to the lib directory of your Play application. From this: "Or do I just need to have code in a controller to instantiate the classes I have already coded and call the methods I need?" it sounds like you would be happy to have your app run in the process of the Jetty + Play server. Check out the Global object for starting your app at process startup.
Check out the section on comet sockets for sending updates from the Play app to the browser. You'll need a bit of Javascript in the web page.
Do you want to have this application running outside of play, perhaps on another server? Can you modify the application, or is this 3rd party software?
If so, you have to have some way to send data back and forth between your play front end and your application. You can either have your application expose a websocket, and then your play front end and your application can push data back and forth to each other. You can then have your client page have a websocket open to you play front end, and then play can push the updates to the client. If your application can't support a websocket, you could also expose some URLs on your front end for the application to POST to. You can then use some sort of message bus or database mechanism (RabbitMQ, redis, Mongo capped collection, or even just a shared Queue object) so that the front end websocket can get those updates and send them to the client.

GWT freeze during RPC call

I'm doing some stuff using GWT with rpc calls in order to get MySQL queries. These queries can be big (up to 500 entries). When I do the RPC call, the browser freeze ( for example, my loading .gif image is frozen ). I thought using RPC call with asyncallback would avoid this problem but obviously It doesn't.
My tests are made on Eclipse (GWT dev plug in) in development mode so I was also wondering if the problem does not come from the server provided by Google. Moreover, I would like to know if this problem will stay when I will deploy the application to an other server. If no, could give me some advices to avoid this type of problems.
First of all, are you running this query on the load of the application? If it is the case, then it is normal.
From my experience with gwt, elcipse and Tomcat, the freeze only happen in Eclipse. When you deploy your application on a server such as Tomcat, this problem will disappear even if the RPC call is on the load of the application.

Activity not responding error on emulator when using webservices in json parsing?

Am new to android, am developing application with websevices using json parsing with httpget method,cant use http post method in android actually.
It working fine normally, but many time it shows the error on emulator like activity not responding force close activity.when i put that url in browser it shows the result .but i don't know why this activity not responding error came.
I think the httprequest took more time to retrieve the data from server,but am not sure. any one help me to how to avoid this error or how to minimize this .
I want know what are the possibilities to get this activity not responding error.
Thanks,
Lakshmanan
You need to perform blocking operations such as I/O in a separate thread - see the below linked resource:
http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/design/responsiveness.html:
In Android, the system guards against applications that are insufficiently responsive for a period of time by displaying a dialog to the user, called the Application Not Responding (ANR) dialog, shown at right in Figure 1. The user can choose to let the application continue, but the user won't appreciate having to act on this dialog every time he or she uses your application. It's critical to design responsiveness into your application, so that the system never has cause to display an ANR dialog to the user.
To avoid ANR (Application Not Responding) dialog,
Your business logic code is inside doBackground() of AsyncTask and You may also need to override onPostExecute(),etc. After that it is better to invoke the async task in a Service (bound or normal service).
Service:
(bound service or normal service based on your requirement)
From, android office documentation:
A service is "bound" when an application component binds to it by calling bindService(). A bound service offers a client-server interface that allows components to interact with the service, send requests, get results, and even do so across processes with interprocess communication (IPC). A bound service runs only as long as another application component is bound to it. Multiple components can bind to the service at once, but when all of them unbind, the service is destroyed.

Threading in GWT (Client)

From what I understand, the entire client side of a GWT application is converted to Javascript when you build, therefore I suppose this question is related to both Javascript and the possibilities that GWT offers.
I have a couple of dozen processes that will need to be initiated in my GWT application, each process will then continuously make calls to a server. Does GWT support threading? Does the GWT client side support threading?
EDIT:
This link states:
No JavaScript knowledge required If you’re just a user of the framework,
which I am for the matter of discussion, you do not need to know JavaScript
in order to write dynamic content, be it client-side such as rolling frames,
docking panels or scheduled “multi-threading” tasks, or server-side calls
using XMLHttpRequests (aka AJAX).
or scheduled “multi-threading” tasks, what does this mean?
JavaScript doesn't support multithreading. However, GWT has a class to 'simulate' threading, which is not real multithreading, but in most cases does what you need: com.google.gwt.core.client.Scheduler.ScheduledCommand. The technique is based on the timer class, which executes a method after the given time elapses.
For example, when placing the following code in you own code, the scheduleDeferred method will return directly and your code continues after the command, while the execute() method is executed using the timer:
Scheduler.get().scheduleDeferred(new ScheduledCommand() {
public void execute() {
.. code here is executed using the timer technique.
}
});
You can create a repeating command RepeatingCommand, which can be used to run the command more than once. Start it with Scheduler.get().scheduleIncremental() that will execute the command until the execute method returns false. You can use this to split tasks into sub tasks to get better 'threading' behavior. The Scheduler supports some additional methods to start a scheduled command differently. See the JavaDoc for more details.
Edited and updated with new GWT class instead of the deprecated DeferredCommand.
There is work on Web Workers as part of HTML5 that is implemented in a number of browsers, but not on all (most notably internet explorer). You could use these features where available, but what you should do is look at the javascript programming model.
Javascript generally works asynchronously. Requests are fired off and at some point their answers are received as an event. You can have a large number of pending requests at the same time. This will require a bit of a redesign of your system though.
New way is to use a Scheduler
JavaScript doesn't support multithreading, so whatever GWT does, multithreading has to be done solely on the server side, because GWT can only use features that are already available on the client side.