Technology stack for smartgwt application

[curiousgally]

Isomorphic,

Our current application stack has a J2EE application deployed in weblogic and has crystal and business objects and jasper reports as the reporting engine. We use struts framework.

We are quiet happy with the capabilities of SmartGwt. There are a few things which we gonna miss moving out of Reporting engines. One such feature is the capability of offline reporting ( we define it as reports which can be run offline on the server and can be viewed by the user later). For this we are looking at Jasper server.

The confusion right now is on what would be the correct approach for the product in the long term.

I mean retain the J2EE stack and integrate smartgwt into it or smartgwt has enough power to integrate jasper or flex etc directly. Provide your inputs on what would be an ideal technology stack for the solution.

Thanks.

[Isomorphic]

What issue do you perceive with offline generated reports? There does seem to be any SmartGWT issue in the way?

You can incorporate Jasper-generated reports via SmartGWT's HTMLPane, but of course Jasper has limited flexibility in terms of adding new functions to the UI, meaning you are better off creating the UI with SmartGWT if you need flexibility.

[curiousgally]

Ya Isomorphic,

We are planning to use Jasper server for our offline reports. We are planning to generate reports on jasper server for offline viewing, pull data and feed it smartgwt components like list grid. We will be doing a spike on this very soon.

Also you said that smartgwt can be used for the UI if you need to retain the benefit to plug in other frameworks that might come our way in due course of time.

Does this approach mean we would lose the advantage of server integration we have in power or enterprise editions (i.e xml data source configurations etc.) . Can we have a SmartGwt server integration into a j2ee app. So that parts of the application could be dealing with smartgwt server.

thanks.

[Isomorphic]

Looks like some basic misconceptions here - the SmartGWT Server is a set of .jars, servlets, and other resources that can be added to any existing J2EE application. It's not a separate server process.

As far as plugging in other frameworks, everything depends on what those frameworks are and what you want your final UI to be able to do, so you'll need to ask specific questions to get good advice.