Re: EGL RichUI Was:Re: From RGP to ¿Java? -- MIDRANGE-L

Thanks for that. I was afraid I missed something. In my particular case, different from yours because most of my business logic is in Java, my servlet methods, called mostly by submits on the web page, have model, view and controller parts but I can just invoke the controller directly with an Ajax call. With that structure I haven't had to touch any of my base code when adding an RUI layer which has simplified my development and allowed me to incrementally add more RUI to the application over time. I was just hoping that that would be the case with EGL.

I'll poke around the Cafe a bit and see what I can find as examples. It has been a few months since I kicked the tires.

Pete

Joe Pluta wrote:

It won't be, at least not this pass. Really no tool can do that, because of the disconnected nature of the architecture - it requires two distinct tiers, one running on the client in JavaScript and one running on the host (in this case, in Java). Most tools can't even generate both sides, at least EGL can do that.

When everything is on the host, as it is in thin client, it's much easier to do all the auto-generation. And if what you want is traditioanl page-at-a-time forms applications, use the thin client. That's what it's there for! You only use RUI if you need the added interactivity of being able to request small chunks of data from the host in response to user events (keystrokes and mouse clicks).

That being said, Will and I have been talking about the ability to have a "backing page" for RUI applications much the same as for thin client pages, but that's going to take some more thought. But really, calling a service from the rich client is awfully easy. You create the service in your middle tier, and then extract the interface (using a right-click) into your Rich UI tier. You then write one line of code in your Rich UI handler to call the service on the host. It returns the data and you process it (note, you have to use a callback function to handle the response, but it's all very easy and the editor does most of the work for you).

But at this time I think it's fair to say that the Rich UI designer is not at the same level of automatic generation from metadata as the JSF editor.

Joe

Well, I am familiar with EGL although those skills have atrophied a bit but I DID take a look at RUI, even sat in on a webinar that you gave. So I sat down at the toolbench and decided to fire up an RUI equivalent to an existing EGL app I had. In fact, I expected (wrongly) that all of the DB I/O infrastructure could be used for the RUI app but I came to a dead end. My expectation was that I could just put an RUI front end on my existing EGL web application.

So, I'll wander over to the Cafe and see what is new since I last checked out the RUI tools. What I want is something that is just as easy as EGL web application development. Build a project, point to the file, drag and drop the DB fields on the page and generate. It didn't seem *quite* that easy with RUI the last time I checked it out.

Pete