Home » Eclipse Projects » Remote Application Platform (RAP) » RWT meets Grails
| RWT meets Grails [message #986221] |
Mon, 19 November 2012 13:57  |
 Benjamin Wolff
Messages: 136
Registered: July 2009 |
Senior Member |
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I'd like to introduce a small plugin that I've been working on recently.
When I have to develop desktop-like interfaces with Grails, I was always missing the nice API and widgets that RAP provides with RWT. After playing around with RWT standalone, I tried to get RWT running in a Grails application. Thanks to the nice and decoupled design of RWT, it was actually pretty easy to get things going. To simplify things even more, I created a Grails plugin that seamlessly integrates RWT to be used as the UI layer.
I think this makes a very powerful combination that enables you to:
- use the Groovy language to build your RWT applications.
- use the powerful features that the full-stack Grails web-framework offers, like the very nice Domain/Hibernate layer (GORM), dependency injection, testing facilities, convention over configuration, deployment, and so on...
- use the RWT API and the server-side centric UI architecture (no pain with DTOs/marshalling, cross-compiling code, etc.).
- simplify the RWT setup and configuration.
The RAP developers really did a great job with RWT and for several reasons I think it has significant advantages over other web UI libraries in certain use-cases. I'd would really love to see RWT gaining some more traction in the Grails community.
So if you can't use the full RAP stack for some reason and want to try RWT standalone you might want to give the Grails-RWT combination a try!
The plugin and documentation is available here: http://grails.org/plugin/rwt
Get acquainted with Grails: http://grails.org/
Being a first release, there are some things I'm planning to improve in the future for the plugin. I'm also always interested to here your feedback and ideas!
Have fun experimenting! 
Cheers,
Ben
P.S: There is a depdencency resolution issue where I could use some help from the RAP community. Usually, dependency jars are defined in a maven-like manner in Grails applications. The jars are then resolved and downloaded from a pre-configured public maven repo. Since I'm using some features provided in the RWT 2.x branch, I'm using the latest RWT 2.0 milestone. Unfortunately, I didn't find any public maven repo that provides the RAP 2.0 milestone bundles. Therefore, I have to package the RWT dependencies within the Grails plugin, which is not a nice solution. It is not possible to configure the RWT version to be used and when a new RWT version is released I have to release a new plugin version. If there are plans to provide the RWT bundles (at least everything that's required for RWT standalone) in a public maven repo, it could really improve this situation .
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| Re: RWT meets Grails [message #986531 is a reply to message #986221] |
Tue, 20 November 2012 18:37  |
Rüdiger Herrmann
Messages: 581
Registered: July 2009 |
Senior Member |
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Ben
I am happy to see RWT running on/with yet another technology. Thanks so
much for your effort and making the result available.
Regarding your dependency issue: there are release builds available from
Maven Central [1], you'll find RWT 1.5 there. I know that there were
plans to also publish milestone builds on a maven repository but I don't
know the current state of this effort.
As I couldn't find an enhancement request, I'd suggest to open one.
Best,
Rüdiger
[1] http://search.maven.org/#search%7Cga%7C1%7Crwt
On 19.11.2012 14:57, Benjamin Wolff wrote:> I'd like to introduce a
small plugin that I've been working on recently.
>
> When I have to develop desktop-like interfaces with Grails, I was always
> missing the nice API and widgets that RAP provides with RWT. After
> playing around with RWT standalone, I tried to get RWT running in a
> Grails application. Thanks to the nice and decoupled design of RWT, it
> was actually pretty easy to get things going. To simplify things even
> more, I created a Grails plugin that seamlessly integrates RWT to be
> used as the UI layer.
>
> I think this makes a very powerful combination that enables you to:
>
> use the Groovy language to build your RWT applications.
> use the powerful features that the full-stack Grails web-framework
> offers, like the very nice Domain/Hibernate layer (GORM), dependency
> injection, testing facilities, convention over configuration,
> deployment, and so on...
> use the RWT API and the server-side centric UI architecture (no pain
> with DTOs/marshalling, cross-compiling code, etc.).
> simplify the RWT setup and configuration.
>
> The RAP developers really did a great job with RWT and for several
> reasons I think it has significant advantages over other web UI
> libraries in certain use-cases. I'd would really love to see RWT gaining
> some more traction in the Grails community.
>
> So if you can't use the full RAP stack for some reason and want to try
> RWT standalone you might want to give the Grails-RWT combination a try!
>
> The plugin and documentation is available here:
> http://grails.org/plugin/rwt
>
> Get acquainted with Grails: http://grails.org/
>
> Being a first release, there are some things I'm planning to improve in
> the future for the plugin. I'm also always interested to here your
> feedback and ideas!
>
> Have fun experimenting! :)
>
> Cheers,
> Ben
>
>
> P.S: There is a depdencency resolution issue where I could use some help
> from the RAP community. Usually, dependency jars are defined in a
> maven-like manner in Grails applications. The jars are then resolved and
> downloaded from a pre-configured public maven repo. Since I'm using some
> features provided in the RWT 2.x branch, I'm using the latest RWT 2.0
> milestone. Unfortunately, I didn't find any public maven repo that
> provides the RAP 2.0 milestone bundles. Therefore, I have to package the
> RWT dependencies within the Grails plugin, which is not a nice solution.
> It is not possible to configure the RWT version to be used and when a
> new RWT version is released I have to release a new plugin version. If
> there are plans to provide the RWT bundles (at least everything that's
> required for RWT standalone) in a public maven repo, it could really
> improve this situation :).
--
Rüdiger Herrmann
http://codeaffine.com
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| Re: RWT meets Grails [message #986669 is a reply to message #986531] |
Wed, 21 November 2012 10:36 |
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Hi Ben,
these are great news, thank you for sharing your work! Do you plan to
publish a little tutorial or blog post somewhere? If so, let us know so
that we can link to it from our website.
Regarding Maven: our build infrastructure creates only p2 repositories
and publishing our artifacts to a public Maven repository involves some
manual steps. That's why we currently only go through this process for
release versions. RAP 2.0 will be released and also published to Maven
Central in February.
I hope we can streamline the process and if it helps, we'll consider
publishing also milestone builds. As Rüdiger said, a bug would be
helpful to discuss this.
Best regards,
Ralf
--
Ralf Sternberg
Twitter: @EclipseRAP
Blog: http://eclipsesource.com/blogs/
Professional services for RAP and RCP?
http://eclipsesource.com/services/rap/
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| Re: RWT meets Grails [message #986687 is a reply to message #986669] |
Wed, 21 November 2012 11:16 |
Benjamin Wolff
Messages: 136
Registered: July 2009 |
Senior Member |
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Hi Rüdiger, Hi Ralf,
thanks for your appreciations! 
I would really like to post a small tutorial that includes all necessary steps, including setting up Grails for those who are not yet familiar with it, or at least link to a good setup tutorial, as there are already plenty good ones. Unfortunately, I don't have a blog or something. I could create one that you could put in your blog, if you tell me which blog software and markup you use? Alternatively I could extend the project documentation on GitHub with a full tutorial instead of just a "Getting Started". It might also be nice to mention/link this in the RWT standalone FAQ.
Regarding the maven availability, I will file a bug (against RAP?) to track the issue. If only the major releases will be available via maven than that would also be ok. I could release a new version on February that would change from packaged jars to a maven dependency configuration. But having the possibility to use the bleeding edge milestones by simply change the configuration would be nice, as I often use the milestones in production if they turn out to be stable enough. However, another problem is the availability of the eclipse.core and eclipse.equinox jars required for RWT standalone. There are only hopelessly outdated versions available in the public maven repos, if any at all...
Cheers,
Ben
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| Re: RWT meets Grails [message #986779 is a reply to message #986687] |
Wed, 21 November 2012 15:35 |
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Hi Ben,
I've missed your documentation on Github [1] which seems pretty
sufficient to get started. I'm not sure if our blog supports guest
authors, but If you don't mind, I'll simply introduce your plug-in in a
short blog post, based on the information in this thread, and point to
your site. Of course, if you have any additional information that you'd
like to be mentioned, let me know.
> Regarding the maven availability, I will file a bug (against RAP?)
yes, against RAP.
> However, another problem is the availability of the eclipse.core and
> eclipse.equinox jars required for RWT standalone. There are only
> hopelessly outdated versions available in the public maven repos
There is component in the RAP incubator that might be useful to you.
It's called osgi-packaging [2] and it creates a RAP feature for Apache
Karaf in a nightly build [3]. If you download the .kar file and extract
it (it's a zip file), it contains a complete Maven repository with rwt,
jface, and the necessary dependencies.
Cheers, Ralf
[1] http://bwolff.github.com/grails-rwt/
[2]
http://git.eclipse.org/c/rap/incubator/org.eclipse.rap.incubator.osgi-packaging.git/
[3] https://hudson.eclipse.org/hudson/job/rap-2.0-incubator-osgi-packaging/
--
Ralf Sternberg
Twitter: @EclipseRAP
Blog: http://eclipsesource.com/blogs/
Professional services for RAP and RCP?
http://eclipsesource.com/services/rap/
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