I am asking this question because, I see that Roo include SPRING MVC and GWT...but
- GWT (on its website) shows an example of a MVP pattern but I think it is not comparable with the SPRING MVC framework (indeed Spring MVC has more features. I have never used it...but I read that it helps a lot to do website, and easily lets have a REST architecture (how to do as easily a REST architecture with GWT and a MVP plateform ?)...
Can you help me to choose between these technologies (taking care that I want to develop my app on GAE, and I will also want Mobile phone version) ?
I suggest you not to use GWT with Roo, its GWT support extremely buggy at the moment. (Saying this as a big fan of Roo)
Also, REST is architectural style which embraces HTTP as an application protocol, not only as a transport protocol, meanwhile GWT is a framework, or rather a toolset for creating rich web application which use JavaScript as a frontend, one has basically nothing to do with the other. You can however use Spring MVC to build RESTful applications:
http://blog.springsource.com/2009/03/08/rest-in-spring-3-mvc/
http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.0.0.M3/spring-framework-reference/html/ch18s02.html
http://www.oudmaijer.com/2010/01/16/spring-3-0-rest-services-with-spring-mvc/
Related
First off, I've never used GWT before. I have good experience in HTML/CSS/JS/JSP.
I'm looking for people's opinions on the suitability of Google Web Toolkit for a brand new web app I'm developing.
A big requirement is that the UI is attractive and well designed (Does not look like a clunky Java/Swing App).
It should look like any typical HTML/CSS/JS based modern website.
It is an internal company application so no SEO is required.
JSF is not an option.
The web app frameworks used will be Spring Webflow and Spring MVC. It will use lightweight controllers to communicate with a service layer.
Would Spring Tiles combined with JSP be an easier or more flexible option than GWT for what I am trying to achieve?
Advantages/Disadvantages of GWT and other options welcome.
Thanks
Advantages of GWT
You don't really need to know any JavaScript, since all your client side code will be in Java
This is usually the main reason people go for GWT. They're backend developers who know Java but don't know Javascript, and they don't really want to learn it. Still, you should be careful about this. GWT is a very complete and complex framework with many concepts that are specific to GWT. Even though you'll be coding in Java you will still have to go through many tutorials and documentation before you can build a clean GWT app
Ready to use widgets, like date pickers, dynamic tables, layout panels, popups
It's not really specific to GWT. Other front end framework, like jQuery or Dojo or whatever also give you these. You can have a look at the GWT Showcase to see what GWT has to offer.
GWT takes care of a lot of complex and potentially dangerous stuff for you.
Stuff like Cross-Browser Support, Internationalization, Image and static resources bundling, Front end security, Ajax communication with a server, Events and MVP (just like MVC) framework support. Have a look at the documentation, it is very well done and very thorough.
Debugging is easy
GWT has two different 'modes'. When you're building your app for production, gwt will compile all the java code for the front-end that you wrote into javascript. This javascript will be executed in your clients' browsers. But when you're developping, you can run your app without compiling your java code to javascript. This lets you use a debugger to debug your interface. It's a very good tool.
Disadvantages of GWT
As I said before, GWT is a full framework, with concepts specific to it. Don't think that just because it's in java and you know java that you won't have to learn new stuff.
Interfacing GWT with back end frameworks is not easy
The most common way for your GWT client code to communicate with a server is by using GWT RPC mechanism. It means that you will need to have servlets that implement specific interfaces. You should definetly read the docs on client-server communication to see if that fits well with Spring. A search on SO or Google should give you pointers to setup your application.
I am looking for a robust REST framework to eliminate all that boilerplate code with starting up a new REST-only web service (mobile clients). Is there a framework that already has this built-in where I could, for example, simply build the domain models and run with it? I would like to see:
Authentication & User Model
Logging
Basic CRUD
Permissions (for model access)
Scalability
It seems every web service at a minimum needs the above capabilities. Somebody, somewhere must have written a good re-usable framework with the above capabilities. Any ideas? I would prefer Node.js, Java or even hosting with a PaaS service provider that offers these features.
Spring 3 MVC provides a very nice and simple annotation based framework for REST.
See http://blog.springsource.org/2009/03/08/rest-in-spring-3-mvc/ it can be deployed on any java web server like Jetty or Tomcat.
A framework like XAP provides a combined solution of Spring and Jetty plus it's built for dynamic scaling.
See http://www.gigaspaces.com/xap.
Last if you want to easily on board this solution on any cloud CloudifySource provides an open source project which includes XAP capabilities and PaaS.
See http://www.cloudifysource.org
I use Symfony 1.4 for this. It is an PHP framework. It generates most of what you need for free. The database stuff is also quite easy as the Symfony uses ORM libraries (you can choose but I can recommend Doctrine: http://www.doctrine-project.org/).
For example the whole backend site(admin) generating is a matter of running one command. They have a great e-book fro free. More info here:http://www.symfony-project.org/.
There is also Symfony 2.X (http://symfony.com/), which have a lot of new features (e.g. new Doctrine 2.0). Especially with the bundle (plugin) https://github.com/FriendsOfSymfony/FOSRestBundle is the RESTful service quite easy.
I'm trying to build a REST web service (server side) that will allow a partner system to connect/POST order information in JSON format. Should I use JAX RS (for example from JBOSS RESTEasy) or Spring MVC to build such a service? They both seem capable enough to accomplish the same thing as far as building a REST service is concerned.
Thank you!
Depends if you want to learn something new or go with what you already know.
If you already have experience with Spring MVC and want to get the work done quickly, then I'd suggest staying with Spring MVC. There are some neat enhancements to the REST features in Spring 3.1, including the ability to generate "end point documentation".
If, on the other hand, you are looking to expand your CV and/or enjoy learning new technologies, then give JAX RS a go. I haven't used it but it is a dedicated WS framework that would likely have any feature you'd require.
Of course, if you have experience with JAX RS but not Spring MVC, then the opposite applies :-)
If you are developing an EE 5 project then I would recommend using JAX-RS with Spring. The RI for JAX-RS, Jersey, has a Spring JAX-RS dispatcher servlet. This makes it much easier to manage dependency injection with JAX-RS and gives you all of the Spring MVC features like form binding and validation, but you are also able to use the Java standard approach for REST - and in my opinion, a better and easier to manage approach than Spring REST.
If it is an EE 6 app, then you may want to think about ditching Spring as JAX-RS is part of the EE 6 specs and you can use EE CDI within your JAX-RS classes.
Notice that Jersey has a bug that affects its integration with Spring:
https://java.net/jira/browse/JERSEY-2301
In summary if you need Spring AOP in your JAX-RS resources it will not work. Dependency injection works well.
REST is more of an architecture style of developing web services which are very easy to understand without even documentation for a developer. Normal tech savy people can easily understand the URL patterns also the response types of JSON and XML support makes it easy for integrating with new javascript modularization standards such as backbone or angular.js.
On the other hand SpringMVC is more concentrating on model-view-controller architecture style of developing applications.
I want to use EJB in my GWT Application, but I coulnd't find a current Tutorial. I am new to the topic of EJB's and with GWt I have worked the last months. At the moment I have got some RPC Calls in my GWT Application and this works. Is it's possible in GWT to use EJB and if yes would it be difficult to install?
GWT is a client-side framework. It can connect with the server-side i.e. using RPC calls, REST web services or SOAP web services. An EJB on the other hand is a server-side technology which can define several entry-points for its clients.
I would consider creating a proper business logic and create a boundary for it - in form of i.e. RESTful Web Services. This functionality can be tested in well-controlled environment or even in real-life application server.
If this is done, than you just need to create a regular GWT application which 'talks' with EJBs through REST-WS.
Sorry, but I'm not aware of any tutorials about GWT + EJB. There is an example of EJB RESTful implementation at Adam Bien's weblog, but if you're really interested in EJB technology and don't know a bit about it, I would recommend to take some decent book first, like Enterprise Java Beans 3.1.
Is Google Web Toolkit is fine to develop database based web application or do you have any other suggestion?
Thanks to answerers!
For a heavy Database based web application, nothing beats Grails. Check out this tutorial by IBM. It will show you the power of Grails and how easy it is to develop database based web applications in minutes. I love GWT and smartGwt, but will go for them over pure grails only if there is a lot of non-database based front end (client side) logic.
If you do not have a programming language of choice (Grails is groovy based, which is based on Java), you could even look at Ruby on Rails which was the inspiration for Grails itself.
Alternately, you can add both grails and gwt in the mix by using this gwt grails plugin so that you have a powerful database integration, as well as a powerful front end developer. (I haven't used this though)
Sure, but you will need to create your own RPC service to get records from server to client and to deliver modified records back the server. But it isn't difficult at all.
Alternatively you could also use SmartGWT, which is an extension for GWT with more widgets, etc. They have data bound objects but in free version would would need to create your own data sources. If you decide to buy a license they seem to have database integration out of the box.
And additional note to consider with SmartGWT is that it has relatively big download size - about 3MB uncompressed and almost 1MB compressed (HTTP server should compresse it; it is in HTTP standard and it is transparent). So if it is going to be a service in public internet it might get quite long to load (often exceeding magic 8 seconds).
I had been working on GWT (Google Web Toolkit) for 1.5 years and learned that its a perfect platform for developing web application which uses backend database for its operation unless you have the right skill sets working on your project and a basic design which is developed according to the requirement of your project.