Group items tagged

"I've had an opportunity recently to work on a product that needed an RIA web interface, and I chose my recent favorite tool for this, Vaadin. The services for this project needed to be highly scalable, and lent themselves well to functional techniques, so I selected Scala as my language of choice. I build my projects with Maven, for reasons I won't go into right now, and I do much of my JVM-language work in Intellij's excellent IDEA IDE. Given these tools, I found a way to facilitate very rapid development of web UI's, and I thought I'd pass it along. Another technique I use, which I'll expound on later, is creating "dummy" implementations of all of my backing services for my application. The "real" implementations are written as OSGi services, in separate modules from my UI. The UI is packaged as a war, but is also OSGi aware, with a bundle activator. This activator only gets called if the war is deployed into an OSGi container, and not otherwise. This allows the app to select which implementation of the services it uses - the "dummy" ones when it's deployed outside of OSGi, and the "real" ones when they're available. This means I can use the handy Maven jetty plugin to quickly spin up my application and test it on my local workstation, without needing all of the dependencies (like a data store and such) of my real services. That's good, in that I can get my "cycle time" down to a few seconds, where "cycle time" is the time between making a change and actually being able to test it in my browser. We can do better, though. I'm using Scala as my language of choice for building the UI as well, as it works just fine with Vaadin (and with everything else in the JVM ecosystem, for that matter, which is why I didn't choose a non-JVM language - but that's yet another rant). I compile my Scala with the Maven scala plugin - here's where the next handy bit comes into play. Turns out the Scala plugin has a goal cal

"LWUIT is a UI library that is bundled together with applications and helps content developers in creating compelling and consistent Java ME applications. LWUIT supports visual components and other UI goodies such as theming, transitions, animation and more."

Supplemental Custom Widgets for SWT (and more) Nebula is a place where different Eclipse-Projects and Independent developers collaborate on building Custom SWT widgets and reuseable UI-Components useable in UI-Applications built using SWT and JFace. All Nebula components are available on the navigation tree on the left or from the table below. Each image links to a page that will further describe the component and its function

Eclipse Rich Client Platform has come a looong way since it was first introduced (and used in Eclipse IDE). The new Eclipse RAP (Rich Application Platform) is also becoming more and more attractive for deploying existing or new Eclipse RCP applications to the web. One of my the projects I'm working on is developed on top of Eclipse RCP. It uses additional plugins such as EMF (Eclipse Modeling Framework) including EMF Editor UI, Teneo (EMF Persistence for Relational Databases), and Hibernate. After some work, I managed to run the whole application on both Eclipse RCP (desktop) and Eclipse RAP (web-based). See the screenshots for proof. Thanks to the recently released EMF Support for RAP I don't have to let go any of the nice EMF generated editor UIs for the web-based RAP version. What's amazing is how little the work I have to do to port the RCP app to RAP. The changes I needed to do is not changing code, but juggling dependencies to plugins and/or packages. Also creating a few platform-specific plugins (different based on whether I deploy on RCP or RAP).

"This release brings some brand new features in GWT Application development Java API for Adobe Flex (AIR and Browser) More then 500 rich UI Compoments for your application ( http://www.gwt4air.appspot.com/) Client side file processing. Specially PDF and Excel Easy integration with your existing GWT application. Because the project is based on GWT, no need of a middleware to connect the Flex UI to the backend "

"Lightweight UI Toolkit makes it very easy to create compelling UI's that will look and behave the same on all devices using a programming paradigm similar to Swing and an advanced GUI builder/theme creation tool. This Toolkit is able to run on CLDC1.1 MIDP2.0/CDC PBP/SE, Blackberry, Java SE and was ported to several other platforms"

Vaadin is a Rapid Application Development (RAD) framework for RIA applications. I only know it for a few months but since I started experimenting with it, I'm really in favor of it. I see a lot of advantages compared to Sun's Java EE standard front-end framework JSF. First of all Vaadin is a java library, so you only have to write Java to build a complete frontend. No need for a specific frontend language, no need for converters (for comboboxes),… This also implies that you can use the full Java power on the frontend side and that's an huge advantage because frontend code is now type-safe and easily refactorable. You can unit test your frontend with JUnit. You can also use all existing java libraries on the frontend side, for example LOG4J. Another advantage is the fact that Vaadin is easy to learn (JSF isn't!) and to use: it's straigtforward. It feels like developing desktop apps and for me developing desktop apps feels much more intuitive than developing web-apps the way I'm used to. Vaadin uses convention over configuration. No need to register new components, validators or whatever in different xml files. Themes have a default folder and a default folder structure. Vaadin is very well documented. There's the book of Vaadin wich explains every aspect of the framework very clear. On the site there's a blog, a FAQ section, a wiki, a forum, examples with Java source code, … It's very easy to extend. Want to create your own Validator? Just implement an interface or extend another Validator and use it. Want to create your own custom server side component? Just extend the CustomComponent class or extend from another component. There's also an add-on directory where you can download UI components, data components, tools, themes, …

"This article looks at the new Jobs API available as part of Eclipse 3.0. It describes the main portions of the Jobs API and the use of scheduling rules. It also describes some changes to Eclipse resource management including how the Resources plug-in integrates with the new API. Finally, it describes some new UI functionality that has been added to provide feedback to users about jobs that are run in the background. "

"Background processes in Eclipse RCP and Eclipse Plugins This article describes how to use the Job API in Eclipse RCP and Eclipse plugins to perform asynchronous tasks. It also discuss how to update the UI thread. This article is based on Eclipse 3.6 (Helios). "

TouchKit allows developers to make applications that look and behave like iPhone applications using only Vaadin. This add-on is available under two licenses: AGPL and CVAL. If your project is compatible with AGPL, you can use the add-on for free; otherwise you must acquire a sufficient number of CVAL licenses before the 30-day trial period ends. For more info, click the license links in the summary above.

"The Pencil Project's unique mission is to build a free and opensource tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping that everyone can use. Top features: * Built-in stencils for diagraming and prototyping * Multi-page document with background page * Inter-page linkings! * On-screen text editing with rich-text supports * Exporting to HTML, PNG, Openoffice.org document, Word document and PDF. * Undo/redo supports * Installing user-defined stencils and templates * Standard drawing operations: aligning, z-ordering, scaling, rotating... * Cross-platforms * Adding external objects * Personal Collection * Clipart Browser * Object snapping * Sketchy Stencil * And much more..."