I am developing a Java EE based web application. We have a very limited time to come up with a alpha version and trying to decide on a web framework to use. It has to be something easy to learn but powerful. Standard JSP/Servlet is not an option here due to the time it takes for the development. Appreciate if anyone could advice. Current options are Wicket and GWT. (JSF is also an option)
Wicket is component-based and comes with a bunch of standard components (like pagination, auto-complete, data grids, form handling etc.). If you want to create a standard panel (with the possibility for easy re-use) just create your HTML fragment to use a template (with wicket:id attributes wherever you want to bind dynamic content or sub-components) and a corresponding Java file. Furthermore, you can attach specific CSS and JS files.
In my opinion, Wicket development is good value (functionality) for money. And you get a lot of built-in AJAX functionality without even writing (not reading) any JS. E.g., change the model for a component, attach the component to an AjaxRequestTarget and the panel is automagically repainted via DOM manipulation.
For a quick overview and intro I recommend Wicket in Action by Dashorst & Hillenius. (And don't miss out on other great resources.)
Everything depends on your application. I don't have experience with Wicket, not much with JSF. I have big experience with GWT.
GWT is good if your application has to be mostly dynamic. In GWT you can change everything on the page not even calling the server. GWT is compiled to Javascript. On the other hand, if you have big project, it is quite frustrating if your application in development starts few minutes, because it has a lot of code to compile to Javascript. My opinion: it is not good for big projects.
If you don't need to change your pages so much client-side, I would use JSF2 (or Wicket, if I knew it).
Have a look at this comparison of Wicket and GWT, this may help you decide for yourself:
Wicket and GWT compared with code
Related
Just got a request for a fresh XPages project where an existing traditional Domino Web application should be modernized and mobilified (iPhone 6 being the target).
I'm comfortable with Boostrap, especially Mark Leuksinks add-on, and that is my first gut feeling.
On the other hand I'm aware of specific Mobile Controls, both from IBM and from Teamstudio, and was wondering if there is a 'best way' you would recommend.
I can pretty much control everything on the server. I'm aiming for quickest effect for minimum effort.
TeamStudio tools are good if you want offline or do other development that does offline (XControls can also be used online, so could give consistent look and feel and development experience).
XPages Mobile Controls require a single XPage in order to get transitions. So if it's a large application, that can make the XPage quite cumbersome. You need to become comfortable with the settings on each mobile page, to know when to refresh and when not to.
If you're familiar with Bootstrap and can "encourage" the end users towards your preference, then as a developer, that would make sense to me (leveraging existing skills means quicker development).
If you're comfortable with Bootstrap and responsive design, we'd certainly encourage going down that route. I take it you are aware that Bootstrap is now part of the XPages Extension Library on OpenNTF ? It was first released there in Nov 2014 and has been continuously updated since. And it will migrate to the core XPages runtime as part of the next GA release
I would use the DAS components and let Domino read/write JSON and implement the frontend using the IONIC framework. It uses AngularJS as JS framework, is conceptually not that different from Bootstrap l, but has all the hooks (using Cordova) to use native phone features.
I am searching for framework references. In other words I am looking for companies, which have successfully implemented a framework solution in java web application environment (success stories). Frameworks I am interested in are JSF, GWT, Wicket and Tapestry. I wasn't able to google any results, nor to find any references at the official sites. At the end I am a bit confused if there are any. Can someone help me out?
Some more webresearches resulted in nice findings:
Wicket: http://web.me.com/jonathan.locke/JonathanLocke/Wicket.html
Tapestry: http://wiki.apache.org/tapestry/PoweredByTapestry and http://wiki.apache.org/tapestry/SuccessStories
JSF: http://wiki.java.net/bin/view/Projects/RealWorldJSFLinks
If you can find anymore, plz let me know :)
Not aware of JSF, Wicket and Tapestry based apps, but Google Wave, Adwords, Adsense are built using GWT
mobile.walmart.com, that surely has some serious traffic, is built with Wicket.
One of the reasons to go for Wicket was the complete decoupling of code and markup. The site serves three different kinds of HTML for different classes off mobile devices from the exact same code on the server.
http://www.dzone.com/links/apache_wicket_powers_mobilewalmartcom.html
Websites based on Wicket seems to be the largest list of Wicket websites out there.
For what it's worth, I was the architect on one of those sites, a financial services portal. There were three other developers, two of them were GWT fans. I haven't kept in touch with one of them, but the other has started his own company using Wicket, leaving GWT in the process. I personally don't like GWT because of the javascript compilation. Wicket has excellent ability to keep markup and code separated throughout the product lifecycle, something that is very hard to do with many technologies. I was a fan of Tapestry for a while, that is until I found Wicket.
Two other frameworks that are JVM based and worth considering are Lift (uses Scala) and Vaadin. People who love Scala swear by it, and after seeing a demo of it, I have to admit I want to start using it soon too.
I'm starting work on a new website (sort of an e-commerce product comparison thing) and I'm trying to choose what technologies to build it on. I've ruled out PHP and I don't think I want to use Python or Ruby. I really like Java and Hibernate so I started looking into Java-based web technologies.
My problem is that all of the documentation and examples I've read can't seem to stop repeating the words "enterprise" and "web applications." I'm afraid of ending up with giant XML configuration files and business-oriented components while losing the ability to actually design the website. From what I've read of JSF, I like the idea of reusable components, but I still want the ability to customize individual pages. So my question is, are JSF/Seam/Spring well-suited for non-enterprise development? If not, what Java technologies are?
I have just started looking into JSF/Seam so please forgive me if this is an uninformed quesiton. Thanks in advance. :)
No problem. The JSF/Seam stack gives you all the customization you want, and it has very few XML files. In fact, it uses a lot of annotations to define entities and components, so you don't have to worry about writing tou much XML (it is one of the reason why Seam was invented).
JSF's standard components are rendered as simple HTML tags, while if you want to go AJAX and use Richfaces it will be a little harder to customize it, but nothing dramatic. I can assure you that for the view part, you can write whatever you want in your webpages.
Here's a nice reference of how the JSF tags are rendered.
For the model and DB part, the JPA framework gives you the ability to work with simple Java Objects, and sometimes using it in an "enterprise" context with legacy schema is even more difficult, so don't worry.
For a simple website you may safely skip the EJB part, this will help you writing a more cleaner project structure. You can package all your website in a simple .WAR file.
As for the "enterprise" word, I think it is more related to the fact that the Java EE framework gives you the feature you may need in an enterprise context, (i.e. EJBs), but you can avoid them.
They don't bite.
Since I don't really have a good idea for word to search with myself I’d like to ask you:
Is there some project, technology, w/e that enables you to build a 'browser' with a very slim ui. Just some CI and a customised "starting page".
I'm thinking of something like the Webkit engine (and interface) Valve/Steam uses for it's clients store page.
In what direction should I search for something like that ? How would one start implement something like that ?
Answers to questions:
We need this to provide something like a "Kiosk" application (for touchscreens) and shippable to our Customers. Running a browser in "full screen" is a temporary solution.
As of Platforms: Windows is absolutely sufficient for now, but Mac/Linux wouldn't hurt.
Prism looks nice so far but lacks the "shippable" part, e.g. I see no way of packaging it.
Take a look at Mozilla Prism. It's a "UI-Less" version of the Mozilla/Gecko rendering engine aimed at deploying web apps on the Desktop. It's also multi-platform. It might be fairly close to what you need, with comparably little work.
WebKit has bindings for many languages, is cross-platform, and is full-featured as a HTML engine. A bit of work capturing signals and calling functions will make it into any kind of web browser you like.
You could use Adobe Air, follow this tutorial and include your website within an iframe. That would allow you to build an executable you can ship to your customer.
Various graphics toolkit libraries contain some components which can display a limited amount of HTML. I've seen this in qt (a C++ GUI library) and in Java Swing, and have indeed built a tiny "browser" in Java within a couple of hours. Java Swing lets you attach a link listener so links can be made clickable and thereby jump to different URLs. Thus, my application could be made to work as a very limited browser.
This approach lets you display text, images and links; in the case of Java, there's even fairly good support for CSS styling. However, there's no simple way to make buttons and form fields work, and of course no support for manipulating the DOM or anything else done in JavaScript.
I am begining a web system and can't decide what technology use! Struts2 and JSF (with jboss seam) are a nice choices, but I can't decide which's better. In JSF have some that I don't like, maybe its "paradigm" no action like. And Struts2, the peoples here don't use more.
The system is a map collaborative web site.
I have used both Struts2 and JSF extensively, both are good but I would still recommend JSF. Here is why.
More users. Yes this counts; more people means its easier to get hands on new programmers.
Better tool support. IDEs like IntelliJ have very good JSF support.
Facelets. Lets face it, JSP sucks. You simply should not be allowed to write business logic inside your view code. Keeping your views in XHTML ensures that they are clean and tidy.
Documentation/Books. This might have changed, but when I was in the struts2 camp (2007/2008) the books available was few and of very poor quality. There is a good choice of JSF/Seam books.
JSF2/Seam. JSF2 is very nice (and IntelliJ 9 supports it). New scopes, such as the view scope, are really helpful (fx. if you are having a long running conversation in a flow).
If you are interested in some of the newer features in JSF2 then checkout this blog post. Also you might want to check out Stripes, it is also a very nice server side web framework and finally here is a very thorough (and a little old) comparison of most Java web frameworks.
This a very debatable topic. I think the main advantage of Struts2, compared to JSF, is its simplicity, it is much easier to grasp. Specially for beginners in web programming, or those familiar with "action based" web frameworks (Struts 1, Webworks, Spring MVC, Stripes).
But Lars Tackmann's points are valid (though Struts2 does not force you to use JSP; and indeed it uses FreeMarker internally). It's true that Struts2 has not attained a big user base, the community (both users and developers) does not seem to be very active, and that is a big minus. JSF also has its shortcomings, I've heard (I've not used it)... as every Java web framework, it seems.