ive currently been developing a Java EE project, using regular web services and backbone.js for my front end. (As i like things being loaded/added to the page, without the page refreshing (async, backbone)).
I wanted to find out if anyone has used grails along with backbone and what their experience is?
Grails would be for server side stuff, and backbone for handling the front end.
Or can grails do this itself. IE, with grails, can you dynamically load stuff onto a page without refreshing. For example, a todo list.
Is it difficult to add backbone to grails?
I've used Backbone + Grails, for two projects. And didn't see any problem, absolutelly.
Backbone is client-side only framework, very flexible, developed with idea that it should be compatible with nearly all server-side stuff. It just expecting RESTful/RESTful-like server side API. And also, you can alway use your own server-client transport implementation, see Backbone.sync (but I'm sure, you don't need it for standard Grails app)
Grails, at other hand, it very flexible server-side framework (mostly server-side). By using Grails you can make RESTful api w/o any problem. Basically you just need to respond with JSON, that's enough.
PS you can also use Grails tags for ajax, like remoteLink and plain jQuery, but Backbone is much more powerful (and easy to learn)
It's not that complex. You can try following this tutorial.
It's a Grails 2.x & BackboneJS project, which utilises the resources plugin.
The tutorial link provided by #chanwit is not working but you can use github link of same project.
Related
I am coming from the Spring + Hibernate + JSF/primefaces site. What I like in Grails is its scaffolding site, so that basic CRUD apps can be created rather quickly.
However, which libaries do you recommend for a beginner in Grails for creating a UI? It should be created quickly and straightforward and also be feature rich (have a look at the primefaces libary)!
The very basic GSP pages are really powerful, especially when combined with any modern JS library. With them you can assemble a complex rich GUIs in instant (well, almost :) )
There are also numerous grails plugins to include almost any view technology of your choice into your web-app, e.g. http://grails.org/plugin/kickstart-with-bootstrap
I would suggest http://grails.org/plugin/twitter-bootstrap once installed you can use the documentation at http://getbootstrap.com/ as your guide.
Is there much point to using angular js on top of asp.net mvc since they're kind of both doing the same thing? What are the advantages to using angular over asp.net mvc + jquery? What kind of scenario would you pick angular in? If you do pick angular in a microsoft environment, what would you run on the server side? Would it be something like Web API? Or is there still benefit of using traditional asp.net mvc?
This question is a bit subjective, however here was our reasoning.
Let the client handle rendering of pages, free up resources on the server.
Leverage built in caching of cache servers since we are just dealing with <html/> content.
Since the pages are cached the only traffic back and forth is json payloads.
We have been using NancyFx, but WebAPI or Service Stack would work just fine.
We wanted to build a responsive single page application and AngularJs fit the bill for testability as full feature rich framework.
AngularJs forces you into a pattern that we needed for JavaScript, in the past our jQuery heavy applications turned into functional spaghetti (That was our fault but being guided by Angular helped out a lot).
As with all frameworks pick the one that suites your needs
On my site http://www.reviewstoshare.com, I am using AngularJS along with ASP.NET MVC. The main reason I did not go all the way with AngularJS was that SEO is not easily achieved with AngularJS.
Keep in mind that my site was already built using ASP.MVC + Jquery for in page interaction as needed.
On the other hand there is still some "Ajaxy" nature to the site like comments, voting, flagging etc. Not too different than Stackoverflow itself. Before AngularJS it was a mess of Jquery plugins and functions within $(document).ready() callback, not to mention the JS code was not testable much.
In the end, I went with both.
If you fancy using Java Script framework then Angular JS rocks.
SEO could be the issue. You need to have deeper understanding of DOM and Java Script as compared to other famous JS Frameworks.
I ve developed a Proof of Concept - using Angular JS with Require JS using ASP.net MVC
You can have a look at it at the below given link
http://angualrjsrequirejsaspmvc.blogspot.com/2013/08/angular-js-with-require-js-front-end.html
For my organization I am evaluating RICH technologies for our next projects.
We are currently using grails 2.1.0 and very happy with that, especially with groovy and gorm and we would like to stay with that. The idea is to extend grails with some RICH framework/library. Currently I am evaluating: grails plugin for ZK, grails plugin for Vaadin, knockoutjs, angular.js, ember.js.
I already received a feedback from my colleagues who worked with ZK (no grails) and their conclusion was: cool, but forget performances, ZK goes to the server every time you do something at client side.
My question is: is this also true with Vaadin (plugin for Grails) ? How does it react with heavy single page applications? and what about Bambi? can this be an option?
On paper grails + Vaadin is what we need: we want to write groovy/java, not xml and surely not javascript. Is this the right choice?
I know my question is very generic, but I am just at the beginning of the evaluation...
Thank you for your attention!
Vaadin works perfectly with Groovy and Grails. You can get services (actually spring beans) by using Grails.get() method and do localization via Grails.i18n() method. Because all the code is going to be written in Groovy, not Java, it will become less heavy (less lines of code and so on...).
Vaadin doesn't go with ever user action on server. You can influence that by setting setImmediate(false) on whatever component.
When you make complex application in Vaadin, you need to be careful how many components you put on the page. If you expect that there will be thousands of components on single page, then browser renderer will have performance issues with handling it (of course speed of rendering depends on your computer hardware). More hints is here.
I recommend - try to build UI in Vaadin and fake database. Then see the performance and then switch to the real database. Usually people blame Vaadin but the problem is elsewhere e.g. in database, indexing, loading to many items at once...
If you don't want to play with JavaScript, then I suppose knockoutjs, angular.js, ember.js are out of the game.
You need to find out, whether the Vaadin components are what you need. I really suggest to try it out and make Proof of Concept in Vaadin. If not, Vaadin 7 simplifies integration with JavaScript! So, you can easily integrate Vaadin server code with whatever JavaScript library (e.g. highcharts and so on...).
You will need to get your containers lazily loaded (check this)
I think you should start with Vaadin 7 (here is a tutorial)
There will be more performance optimalisations in Vaadin 7 (in versions 7.0.1 or 7.0.2)
I previously developed only Java SE applications, and now I am trying to do some small project in Grails. My front-end developing skills are really bad. Ok, I got the main ideas behind GSP in Grails, but there are many tools which alow to simplify front-end development, like Twitter Bootstrap.
My question is, what tools for front end are best suited for Grails project and can be naturally combined with GSP?
Another option I am looking into is doing whole front-end on something like Flex, how hard is it to do such thing in Grails?
Grails is best suited for HTML+CSS+JS front-end. You still can use Flex, Vaadin, GWT, etc., if you prefer. But standard HTML + modern framework is really easier to use.
For standard web app, based on html/css/js, I can recommend Twitter Bootstrap plugin (but you aren't limited to it). It's very useful framework, but you should know all basics (html and css)
As i see Vaadin is a Java based UI framework. But it has some really nice set of widgets and a very good layout engine. Is it possible to integrate Rails and Vaadin? JSON perhaps??
It sounds like that'd take a lot of work creating an interface between them which will likely only slow things down. By the time you had everything working the way you wanted you could've finished what you wanted in Rails or Vaadin separately.
If you did make an interface, JSON is the way to go. Lightweight and almost everything supports it with little overhead.
is there any alternative to javascript based frameworks?? other than the usual ones (jquery, prototype, sproutcore
Just pointing out, that all rich UI frameworks that run in the browser are JavaScript in the end (not including any plugins like Flash), even Vaadin, which is built on top of GWT on the client side.
I guess you'll have to consider integrating with the Rails backend either on the server side (e.g. with a Vaadin Java servlet) or on the client side with a custom data exchange over HTTP (using JSON) and using some client side framework like GWT, SproutCore, Cappuccino etc.