A question for all the GWT gurus out there.
I'm a newbie in GWT and am trying to understand the best practices of coding a GWT application. I have gone through "Large scale application development and MVP" based on Ray Ryan's talk at Google I/O 2009 and it has given me a good starting point. I downloaded the sample source code as well for the Contacts application based on the best practices listed.
The application I'm trying to develop using GWT is a bit bigger (in terms of the modules involved) when compared to the sample "Contacts" application & so I want to split it up into multiple functions.
I have been reading that having a single Entry point in a GWT application is a good idea, and I don't want to dump all the code in one single AppController class & one single RpcService, what would be the best approach in this situation?
How would I go about dispatching the control to multiple controllers? Is there a way to achieve this using some classes in the GWT framework?
For large GWT apps, a framework like GWTP (which is a fork of gwt-presenter and gwt-dispatch) is almost necessary. It provides things like Places for handling location/history, a handy Presenter framework, EventBus, and really simple codesplitting.
If you are developing very big application then split your application into multiple modules.
For client side MVC pattern I suggest PureMVC.
http://puremvc.org/
If you're worried about initial load size and it's possible to load your big app in different chunks, consider Code Splitting
Related
I am thinking about developing a new application using web toolkit. I decided that the best option is going to be to use the Model-View-Presenter Design Pattern. After doing plenty of research, I found two different ways of implementing the skeleton code. (I am still trying to learn MVP and how to best utilize the disjunction between the model and the view)
Here are the two links discussing GWT MVP
https://developers.google.com/web-toolkit/doc/latest/DevGuideMvpActivitiesAndPlaces
https://developers.google.com/web-toolkit/articles/mvp-architecture
I read through and understand all the information in the second link, how you associate presenters with views, and how you have your custom events and such. I really like this because this means that several developers will be able to work on the project I have in mind.
However, the first link, also points out some interesting stuff, mostly using XML and #UiBinder and other things. I feel that those will not be necessary for this particular application but I want to make sure I have not overlooked anything.
Basically - How good of a programming practice is the style the style in the second link (the one with presenters for each view)
Thank you
You should be not be comparing MVPActivitiesAndPlaces and MVP . If browser history management is not your concern use only MVP.
Activities And Places are not mandatory for MVP. They only allow you clean browser history management which integrates nicely with MVP architecture.
UiBinder is not mandatory for MVP. They can be used with MVP.
The MVP design paradigm mostly is driven with Unit testing as main driver and to keep out slow running GWTTestCase out as much as possible.
At the heart of this pattern is the separation of functionality into
components that logically make sense, but in the case of GWT there is
a clear focus on making the view as simple as possible in order to
minimize our reliance on GWTTestCase and reduce the overall time spent
running tests.
In a project i'm working on, we follow the MVP structure but we do not use any particular framework like GTWP. For such situations where theres no code splitting 'out-of-the-box' what are some best practices to adopt in the utilization of this tool? (Where to split the code, other considerations, etc)
I recommend to go through GWT Developer's Guide Code splitting . It talks some best practices.
https://developers.google.com/web-toolkit/doc/latest/DevGuideCodeSplitting
I have been developing a plain JSP/Servlet web application, which focuses mainly in collecting large sets of data through JSPs, processing them and finally commiting them to a MySQL database. Imagine something like a declaration of assets for a pretty big number of people.
While it works pretty good now, the code is really jumbled up and since I now have the time, I am thinking of completely redesigning the whole application in a more sophisticated and reusable way. My main problem is that forms are built mainly through jQuery (my form_build.js and form_validate.js files span over 600 lines each at the moment), and the back-end java code is jumbled up since there is massive use of name[counter] input fields.
I.e. The user can add 5 assets in the form, where he has to submit something like 30 fields of information on each one. The form sends them in the form of attribute[asset_counter].
If I managed to make myself clear, I have been looking into the Google web toolkit - which I had no idea of before - and from what I gather mastering it will take some time for me. Is it worth the trouble, or is it aimed at something completely different? And is there a framework or technique that can handle efficiently what I need?
Frankly, I am a senior java developer and I used a lot of jsp/jsf web applications accompanied by EJB, webservice, simple spring web apps, and I recently came up to use GWT.
It's a very nice platform, it has the following advantages:
All the code is compiled to html/JS which is better in terms speed
and browser understanding agilty
It uses built in JSON xml transer (nice approach)
It use built in AJAX (nice approach)
It use it's own cleint server platform (no need to use other
libraries for each one)
It will adopt to any browser (strong competetor)
drowbacks:
Sometimes it takes time to load in the browser (specially when using
FlexTables)
I advise you to use it!
GWT is a very powerful toolkit, and from what I understand it might help you to better organize you client side code. But you also have to consider some high-level JS framework like backbone.js+require.js or Google Closure. Time spent to learn this frameworks this bascially the same as for GWT, the choice basically depends on what your team prefer, JS or Java. In most cases when logic on client side gets very complicated, I will choose GWT.
I am about to start building an app that will be used across all platforms. I will using monotouch and monodriod so I can keep things in .net
I'm a little lazy so I want to be able to reuse as much code as possible.
Lets say I want to create an application that stores contact information. e.g. Name & Phone number
My application needs to be able to retrieve data from a web service and also store data locally.
The MVVM pattern looks like the way to go but im not sure my approach below is 100% correct
Is this correct?
A project that contains my models
A project that contains my views,local storage methods and also view models which I bind my views to. In this case there would be 3 different projects based on the 3 os's
A data access layer project that is used for binding to services and local data storage
Any suggestions would be great.
Thanks for your time
Not specifically answering your question, but here are some lazy pointers...
you can definitely reuse a lot of code across all 3 platforms (plus MonoWebOS?!)
reusing the code is pretty easy, but you'll need to maintain separate project files for every library on each platform (this can be a chore)
MVVM certainly works for WP7. It's not quite as well catered for in MonoTouch and MonoDroid
some of the main areas you'll need to code separately for each device are:
UI abstractions - each platform has their own idea of "tabs", "lists", "toasts", etc
network operations - the System.Net capabilities are slightly different on each
file IO
multitasking capabilities
device interaction (e.g. location, making calls etc)
interface abstraction and IoC (Ninject?) could help with all of these
The same unit tests should be able to run all 3 platforms?
Update - I can't believe I just stumbled across my own answer... :) In addition to this answer, you might want to look at MonoCross and MvvmCross - and no doubt plenty of other hybrid platforms on the way:
https://github.com/slodge/MvvmCross
http://monocross.net (MVC Rather then Mvvm)
Jonas Follesoe's cross platform development talk: Has to be the most comprehensive resource out there at the moment. He talks about how best to share code and resources, abstract out much of the UI and UX differences, shows viable reusable usage of MVVM across platforms and nice techniques for putting together an almost automated build. (yes, that includes a way for you to compile you monotouch stuff on Visual Studio)
Best of all he has a available source code for the finished product and for a number of the major component individually placed in its own workshop project and a 50 + page pdf detailing the steps to do so.FlightsNorway on github
IMO the only thing missing is how best to handle local data storage across all platforms. In which case I would direct you to Vici Cool Storage an ORM that can work with WP7, MonoTouch and (while not officially supported) MonoDroid.
*Disclaimer* The site documentation isn't the most updated but the source code is available. (Because documentation is Kriptonite to many a programmer)
I think the easiest way to write the code once and have it work on all three platforms will probably be a web-based application. Check out Untappd for example.
You can start by looking at Robert Kozak's MonoTouch MVVM framework. It's just a start though.
MonoTouch MVVM
I have to create now a multi-screen Silverlight 4 RIA application with MVVM.
Each of these screens has to be devided in multiple regions (for example master-detail scenario whereas each of them is a different section and one has control on the other).
Can you give me some ideas what should be the right way to implement such an application?
Is Prism the right choice? I started reading the Prism manual and liked very much the idea of having regions and screens switched and controls in a very flexible manner, but, as said above, I find it too overkill to split it all over many assemblies.
If Prism IS the right choice, then I would appreciate any kind of guidance or reference to guidance on this particular scenario (multiple screens & regions and OTOH not getting my solution spotted with a gazillion projects.
I believe that PRISM is the correct choice for building an application with multiple regions and views. You could argue that that is almost the definition of a composite application.
But I would also remember that you don't have to use all the components PRISM has, you can pick and choose. I would recommend that you consider each aspect of PRISM and test/prototype to ensure you are happy with the facilties offered. In a large application I have built I use PRISM but after some prototype investigations I only used EventAggregator and the Modularity capabilities.
I chose not to use the region support as I found working with ItemControl and ContentControl components in Silverlight gave me the ability to inject views and partial views into my interface.
I found experience from ASP.NET MVC proved useful in considering how to coordinate/break up my UI into partial views.
Hope that helps. The Stocktrader application is a great example to learn from (included with the PRISM distributable).