I'm looking at enterprise JavaFX, and how to integrate JavaFX with server-side code. In the last few weeks I've done a certain amount of research in DataFX and Open Dolphin, and downloaded some videos, as well as looking at a couple of other frameworks. For example I've looked at the video on DataFX at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN4fo6x0DcQ
However, although this video and others I've looked at explain how to set up a client application that connects with a server, I've found very little information on how to put together some server-side code that the client can connect to. Sure, one could use JAX-RS, but why re-invent the wheel? In the first instance I would like to put together some really simple server-side code that some test client-side code can connect to using DataFX or one of the other frameworks. The aim eventually is to get a client using JavaFX to communicate with a server.
My second question is that of the various frameworks available, is DataFX the best to use for a simple application?
I have experience with a Glassfish server hosting a JSF application, and it may be useful to have such a server hosting a JSF application communicating with a browser as well as communicating with a client JavaFX, as that way I can test out that the communication with the JavaFX application.
The latter is a bit of an aside, and my main questions are where can I get information on server-side programming for this, and the best frameworks to use?
Many thanks in advance.
If you are able to manage yourself the client-server communication you can pick any JavaFX Application Framework listed there:
https://github.com/mhrimaz/AwesomeJavaFX
Any of them allows to separate UI code from communication code.
As I'm author of JRebirth, I can advice you to create some RemoteService (extends Service and providing JAX-RS facilities or whatever) to perform this job.
If you search an all-in-one library managing client AND server side, DataFX + OpenDolphin is probably the most advanced one.
I'm the author of DataFX & Dolphin Platform (https://github.com/canoo/dolphin-platform). Both are valid frameworks that fill fit to your needs. Maybe a combination of both - Dolphin Platform as remoting layer between client and server and DataFX to define the routing and mvc based views on the client.
Some days ago I copied all the DataFX sources to GitHub (https://github.com/guigarage/DataFX) and currently trying to create a new version based on the modules that are maintained by me. Maybe I will extract the MVC related stuff and create a new framework based in it, we will see. What I currently can say is that I plan to work on it the next month next to the Dolphin Platform since I think a combination of both will be a good fit.
I would use this combination today to create applications but yeah, I'm the main developer of both frameworks so the choice is quite easy for me ;)
As you mentioned JSF I think that Dolphin Platform is a perfect match for you since one idea of the framework is to have a modern successor for JSF that can be used to create desktop & web based applications but provide managed controllers on the server. We provide a cool maven based jumpstart (Maven archetype) that will give you a quick introduction and a runnable client / server application with a desktop and web client in 2 minutes: https://canoo.github.io/dolphin-platform/#_dolphin_platform_jumpstart
Related
Effort:
I am building a word game based on a chat web-client where I need to make a server call on input chat text to validate it before broadcasting on the chat.
I am aware of Meteor providing latency compensation out of the box. But given its still in "early preview" makes me seek other alternatives.
What I tried:
Unfortunately my web search for "latency compensation framework library" doesn't yield anything other than Meteor (including non-personalized results).
Question: Are there any other alternatives that provide latency compensation -or- can make the job easier? I am hoping other developers might have encountered something useful/relevant.
Although Meteor is in 'early preview', its code is very close production ready and a lot of startups and other early adopters are using it for production-level code. You aren't going to find anything that gives you wings like Meteor because no such alternative exists.
As a hardcore Meteor convert and someone who's used many other frameworks, I recommend you to just try Meteor out. As they say, it only takes a weekend for you to build an app in Meteor and decide whether it's right for you.
Having said that, I will attempt to answer the question and list the distant-second alternatives to Meteor that you probably won't want to use:
Derby
Sails
What you're seeing right now in the various real-time full-stack Javascript web frameworks is the future of Web development, cutting down dozens of people and thousands of man-hours of work needed to develop a software project. There are some fast boats sailing that are leaving server-side rendering behind, and you should probably just get in one of them and get going.
RethinkDB uses term 'latency compensation'.
I've also tried to gather per-feature alternatives to Meteor
Meteor is a really cool framework. you can build the complex data driven application very easily using meteor.
But, this framework currently supports only the MongoDB as back-end database.
I have recently created full stack framework called Nooljs which is similar to the Meteor. Now I have open sourced it. It support all the database connections including MySql, ms-sql, and MongoDB. The complex data driven application can be created easily using this framework.
This has been developed using well known existing framework such as Angularjs, Node, express-js, and socket-io.
Easy to build complex data driven JavaScript applications with minimum coding.
Support multiple data connections suck as Ms-sql, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Mondodb.
Real time framework build top of Express-js and Socket-io
The client side is powered by the Angularjs.
The layout can be build using the Angularjs tags and elements.
Modularized layout to simplify the complex web pages.
Can be mixed both Express-js and Socket-io
How to create web application using Qt?
This depends on what you mean by "web application". If you mean an application that can show parts of a web page in its interface as rendered HTML, like a browser can...yes. Qt incorporates something called QtWebKit:
http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtwebkit-index.html
(Note: Back in the olden days it was Microsoft--I think--who first made an embeddable Internet Explorer control so that you could fetch a URL into the midst of some MFC or VB application and run a browser in the midst of your otherwise-form-based application. The event hooks for Microsoft's solution sucked, Qt's are much better.)
Anyway, this is great if you want people to install your application on their machine, where it fetches web data but takes advantages of native features to be richer than a browser could. But be careful because these days native apps have to be really outstanding to surpass the advantage of something that runs in a browser they already have.
HOWEVER If you are trying to use QtCore to push server-side content out and fulfill web requests, that'll be an uphill battle. You might find some related examples if you look hard enough:
https://web.archive.org/web/20100922075100/http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2006/12/20/whats-this-cgi/
Very few people use C++ (much less Qt) to generate web pages server-side. Yet there are still some doing it, even in pretty cool ways:
http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt
...regardless, QtCreator will be no help in that kind of pursuit.
The functionality you are asking for does not exist within Qt itself. However, there exists (at least) one third party library that allows some of the Qt code for a desktop app to be re-used to a certain extent for serving up a web app:
http://cutelyst.org/
However, this does not magically allow you to write a QML interface with QML Widgets and have a visual interface accessible via a web browser.
What do you mean by "web application"? Is it a desktop app with web features? If so, yes Qt in general is very good for that.
If you mean a kind of server that outputs HTML, then you should use something else because you would have to reinvent many wheels to make it work.
You'd require to run or embed web server. It would be more whise to turn to a Apache Web Server or Apache Tomcat based approach. Otherwhise you'd run somewhat against the odds.
Consider also using some HTTP server library like libonion or Wt. Wt is close in spirit to Qt. However, you won't use Qt itself. libonion is lower level (and you may want to use browser-side Web frameworks like e.g. JQuery or AngularJS with it).
If you already have some Web server, you could consider developing some FastCGI application in C++.
You surely need a good understanding of HTTP protocol and of HTML5 & AJAX.
Since this is 11 years old, I thought I'd come here to tell you that it does indeed seem possible now that qt supports webassembly. The newest version, 6.4 (newest version as of today jan 31 2023), now offers support for webassembly and their website has various examples of apps built with qt that run in the browser.
https://www.qt.io/qt-examples-for-webassembly
We have a large code base in MFC and VB. A few applications are in .NET. All these applications interoperate with each other on the user's machine and also connect with Unix servers via sockets.
Recently we have started discussing a re-write of our applications and possibility of moving a lot of these desktop applications to web (they would run in intranet). A straight forward way is rewritting them in one of the .NET technologies. But a suggestion about using Google Web tookit has popped up and the argument is that it would help creating applications that would run in a browser on both desktop and mobile devices.
One of the key problem that I see is that GWT is a large abstraction over Javascript. This will require the team to learn GWT, Javascript, IDEs etc as their experience has been primarily Microsoft technologies and not Java. It would be easier for them to learn .NET technologies instead of GWT.
I do not have a depth of GWT and its drawback pittfalls and do not know about a parallel Microsoft Technology that I should investigate.
So I would appreciate if people here can share their views or experiences using GWT or equivalent Microsoft technology.
Questions like this are subjective, so you wont get one straight answer. Are you rewriting the unix/socket backend as well? Or do you intend to put a web service wrapper in front of the sockets because without this I cant see a web / internet solution working.
For my money if you are a .net/microsoft house then a MS technology is the way to go. MS is currently backing jQuery which is a client side javascript framework, but there are others like extjs. If you stick with MS and a server side solution then ASP.NET MVC is currently gaining a lot of traction. MVC and jQuery work well together imho.
If you set up a REST based web service layer for your backend it means you can even get away with flat html front ends powered by any javascript framework without needed a server side web rendering technology at all. For REST you can look at .NET WCF if you stick with MS tech.
Given that you've been working with MFC and VB, .NET is going to be a new world to you as well. At least with Microsoft you'll have strong development tools and learning resources that you'll need. Not so sure that will be the case with GWT.
But also, if one of your developers wins the lottery and leaves the company, you'll have fewer problems finding another MS developer to replace him.
Given you guys are a Microsoft development shop, I'd stick with the Microsoft stack (unless your developers really want to learn something new - in my experience that's rarely the case).
Anyway, I thought I'd bring up that Microsoft had an "embraced and extended" version of GWT called Volta that they release 2-3 years ago. The idea is that it takes C# as its source file, and compiles that to Javascript.
I suspect the project is dead (I can't seem to find a whole lot of information about it), but you may want to verify that. I brought it up because you guys seemed like a Microsoft shop who's interested in GWT.
Based on your provided information I think it is better to use fromMicrosoft Technologies instead of Google Technologies.
This will reduce Cost (include Time to learn and also the budget and etc)
on the other hand, Silverlight goes on the windows phone mobiles with (WinMo7) so your application will run as the same in Cellphones too. So my sugesstion is to use Microsofts Technologies.
Let me start off by stating that I am a novice developer, so please excuse the elementary nature of my question(s).
I am currently working on a Flex Application, and am getting more and more confused about when to use server side scripting, and when to develop web services. For most of the functionality I am working on, I am taking various files from the user (client), uploading to the server for processing/conversion, then sending back to client in new format.
I am accomplishing most of this using asp.net generic handlers (ashx) files, but not very confident this is best practice. But at the same time, does making web services make any more sense? What would be considered best practice for this? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
The way I look at it is as follows:
Web Services mean Established Best Practice.
For most of our development, we don't need to create "Web Services", or what I'm thinking when I think REST, SOAP, and the Twitter API. You only need to start doing that once you've got something you're going to be using every day for years.
Clean and DRY code will Lead you to Creating a Web Service
If you spend the time to clearly define the parts of your upload-process-render Architecture, and you find that it can be applied to almost everything you are doing, then all you need to do to make it a Web Service is define a clear, 1-2-3 set of rules for using the system (GET/POST data, etc.). As long as you are consciously building an architecture the whole way, you'll end up creating a Web Service if it's worthy. Otherwise there's no need.
It sounds like you have a clear workflow going, I don't know anything about asp.net though.
As far as it being confusing sometimes, and best practices, I suggest the following:
Create a Flex Library Project for your "generic ashx file handling" Flex classes. Give it a cool, simple name.
Create a .NET Library Project that encapsulates all the logic for your server-side file processing. Host it online and make it open source. I recommend github. Test it as you go, and document it, its purpose and the theory behind it.
If you don't have to do anymore work at this point, and it's just plug and chug, then you've probably arrived at something that might become a Web Service, though that's probably a few years down the road.
I don't think you should try to create a Web Service right off the bat. Just make some clean and reusable code, make a few examples, get it online and open source, have others contribute and give feedback, and if it solves a specific problem, then make it a web service. You can just use REST for now probably, and build your system around that. RestfulX is a great library for that.
Best,
Lance
making web services without any sense make no sense ;)
Now in the world of FLEX as3 with flash version 10, you can easily read local files, modify them with whatever modifcation algorithm and save local files without pinging server.
You only have to use webservices if you want to get some server data or to send some data to server. that's all.
RSTanvir
Flash / Flex uses a simple HTTP POST approach for file uploads, so trying to do that using SOAP web services will be problematic. Your approach of using ASHX here sounds reasonable to me.
To send / receive data that isn't file based (e.g. a list of files the user has uploaded previously), I would recommend looking at the open source Fluorine FX library. Fluorine uses AMF which is a highly performant way of doing data transfer with Flash. It's also purely configuration-based, which means you don't need to code against any of its APIs, just configure Fluorine to expose your .NET service classes. You could easily add attributes to those same classes to expose them as SOAP web services via WCF if you need that in the future. I would not recommend using SOAP with Flex however, due to the performance losses and also because the Flex implementation of SOAP has a history of bugs and interoperability problems.
I have a few projects coming up that have a number of endpoints or clients that can hit the same data. For instance a site might have...
A asp.net MVC based end user facing website
A web based adminitration back end that can allow specific, limited updates from some users in situatiosn where a full client isn't useful (mobile web etc)
A full on rich client for administration so we can use touch and other techniques to really make the user experience for content management shine - these may be silverlight or full on WPF apps, as needed
The question is... whats the best way to connect all that? Right now I use a multiple project split for the MVC.
ProjectName.Core - this project has all the common models, all the repository classes and all the helper classes
ProjectName.Web - an MVC project that references the Core to pull in the repositories and models it needs
ProjectName.Admin.Web - another MVC project dedicated to the admin interface that references the Core to pull in the repositories and models it needs
(which will ultimately live on a seperate subdomain from the end user facing site)
Then the story peters out int he sense of clear guidance. When the time comes to build a WPF / Silverlight project to hit the data I can do one of the following to the best of my understanding now...
Convert the "Core" to provide a RIA style DomainService, and attempt to alter the MVC projects to make use of it. However there is little guidance on using MVC with RIA, RIA is in its infancy AND the WPF to RIA story is also still only thinly documented
Do the same as above, but using WCF. However WCF prings with it async complexity that I really want RIA to hide for me.
Fall back 20 yards and just bolt plain old web services onto the Core on top of the Repositories and Models I already have. This seems... old school :)
Any thoughs and input are welcome including pointers to examples and documentation. I want to make the best decisions I can now, and am coming up to speed fast on RIA and WCF so I can but community input is always helpful.
Thanks!
Take a look at ADO.NET Data Services (formerly known as Project “Astoria”).
On my way to work today I was listening to a .NET Rocks! podcast, "Stephen Forte on Data Access Options", and they very excited about this, especially for scenarios like the one you describe.
It's interesting stuff, and something I would check out sometime very soon.
I think there's something to be said about plain old WCF services, these can make use of your domain services and repositories and expose a model more appropriate for services. Too often I've found that simply exposing the domain model on the wire ends up with a duplication of logic on both the client and the server.
My advice would be for some sort of service layer, this has the logic of shaping your domain model into appropriate types for the wire. \
Ideally I'd like to be able to share my Domain Services between the client (WPF / Silverlight) and the server (ASP.NET MVC) and have different underlaying repositories (Linq to NHibernate / Astoria). Difficult with the asynchonous nature of Silverlight.
For the curious, it certainly looks like RIA Services is the win here. Build a single DomainService then consume it everywhere. Brad Abrams covers a lot of this ground at bit.ly/94fFx - it really helped.