Some guidelines of a good presentation

Hi,

Recently I gave a GWT overview lecture for Tikal internal crowd. This made me look for guidelines on how to create a presentation that is both informative and interesting to hear.

Sure, it depends on the content – that is a given. But it seems there are good and bad ways to create a presentation.

More info in this link.

GWT ramblings of a Flex developer – CSS and Images

Hey!

Last time, we talked about I18N and as promised, this time we’ll discuss CSS handling.

Since you can’t really talk about CSS without talking about images, we’ll also mention them as well.

Well, as seasoned Flex devs, you know that using CSS in Flex is a brease.
You just slap the style tag in your application mxml and you’re done.

In GWT, things are not that easy.

GWT ramblings of a Flex developer – localization / I18N

Hello again,

This time I want to talk about localization (a.k.a. i18n).

As Flex developers, as I assume you already know, all you have to do is create a *.properties file (say Messages.properties) and in it define keys with localized values, like:

columnHeaderName=Name

Then, in the main application mxml, you would define the resource bundles:

<mx:Metadata>
	[ResourceBundle("Messages")]
</mx:Metadata>

And basically you’re done. All you need to do to use it, is use the ResourceManager class to access the localized value of the key.

Simple stuff, right?

Not so with GWT…
Read more here.

GWT ramblings of a Flex developer – creating your project

First, a small update:

Those who read my last post, here, know that I was planning to use MVP with gwt-dispatch.

Well, at the time, GWTP seemed like an overhead and it included a fork of gwt-dispatch anyway so I thought MVP with gwt-dispatch would be lightweight and straight forward.

But, it seems GWTP has a lot more punch to it.

First, it allows for nested presenters, which is good. Second, it’s dispatch mechanism is like gwt-dispatch on steroids. Third, a lot of the boiler plate code is generated for you, especially if you use the GWTP eclipse plugin. Plus, it has annotations for auto generated DTOs and the like.

So, eventually, we decided to go with GWTP.

Well, that decided, I set out to create the client side eclipse project.

I created a Maven enabled project. The pom.xml file included the GWT-maven-plugin.

The result was a nightmare. Every build took 3-5 minutes, even after setting the permutations to only build for FF.

I wanted to have a work process where I code in Java and, using the development mode, run\debug the Java code with the server BackEnd running and responding to client requests, and to be able to build in a few seconds if I was to keep my sanity.

Below is what I did.

1.    Since it’s a maven project, it’s not a gwt project out of the box.
Mark it as a gwt project (right click -> properties -> Google -> Web Toolkit).

2.    Run the project as a Web Application. You will be prompted where to deploy the WAR – select the snapshot folder on the target folder

3.    Install tomcat on your machine and define it in eclipse. After you do that, go to the tomcat properties and under publishing, select ‘never publish automatically’.

You see, tomcat looks for the WAR file under the target folder, that’s why we did step 2. The thing is, that when you have tomcat publish automatically, it changes files in the target folder as part of the publish process, which, of course, triggers another publish process… you can imagine where this is going…
Setting to ‘never publish automatically’ does not mean you have to publish every time you make a code change – that is still synced.

4.    Publish and start the server

5.    Comment out the gwt-maven-plugin in the pom.xml file. We don’t need it in development, since we are using development mode to run\debug.

So, final setup for day-to-day development is start the server and publish, then run the project as a web application in development mode. Since both are up, client-server RPC calls will work as you expect and you can still debug your Java code.

Sheesh!
Next post will describe how to use Action\Result objects (Command\Response in gwt-talk) to make RPC calls.

Newsflash – it is not as simple as you might think…

Until next time – happy coding!

GWT ramblings of a Flex developer – live search component

Recently, I had to create a custom component that does live filtering on data presented in a grid.

If you are reading this series, you probably know how this can be done in Flex. If you don’t, a quick google search will probably point you in the right direction. Enough to say that in envolves a custom component to get the search criteria and a filter function on the grid’s dataProvider ArrayCollection.

I was surprised this is relatively straight forward in GWT (using uiBinder and GXT 3.0)

GWT ramblings of a Flex developer – First impressions

Well, I have done a lot of reading this week.
I also feel like some of the dust has cleared from my Java muscles and bones.

GWT ramblings of a Flex developer – Intro

I am a Flex developer. Have been for the better part of the last 4 years.
Originally I was a Java server side developer.

Flex mobile applications running in the background

When writing mobile applications over Flex 4.5.1, your application may be running in the background, even when pressing the back or home buttons on your device. This may become a problem if your application is doing things using timers, making server calls etc.

Mobile Flex application splash screen

When developing mobile applications with Flex 4.5.1 you are always going to have a short time until the application loads.

It is very recommended to add a splash screen to your application to ease the wait and improve the User Experience.

Is Flex dead to be replaced by HTML5?

Over the past few months, I have heard that question many times.

Many think HTML5/JavaScript is going to replace it, and with Adobe releasing Edge it seemed to be a valid point.
Deepa Subramaniam, Senior PM for the Flex team, alleviates those concerns with her post (rather a post on the Flex team blog).

It is a must read.