Application stack

[devep1]

smartgwt power 3.1

Hello
I would like to double check my application stack before is too late :-)

I wish to use along with smartgwt power some "standard" components:

1. springframework 3.1.x + spring-roo 1.2.2
2. spring-security
3. persistence layer:
   • db2
   • hibernate
   • jpa2 annotations
4. Responsive frontend supported by twitter bootstrap boilerplate html/css/js code

Is there something "wrong" with these? I've seen some scaring posts here concerning "twitter bootstrap" (should I use plain H5BP instead? http://www.initializr.com/) and nearly nothing (no sample, no doc) about spring security integration.

Thank you.

[Isomorphic]

As far as backend technology, we recommend the SQLDataSource rather than JPA, and especially not spring-roo. SQLDataSource is much much simpler, faster, more powerful and more flexible. We do the best we can simplifying JPA via our JPADataSource, and it's still just not nearly as good as SQLDataSource.

There's nothing wrong with Spring Security and we provide a wiki article showing how to use it to set up authentication with Relogin.

We would generally recommend against Twitter Bootstrap unless you have a lot of experience with low-level HTML and DOM usage.

More generally, we would recommend that you figure out what specific problem you are trying to solve with Twitter Bootstrap and which specific features you want to use in what scenarios.

[devep1]

As far as backend technology, we recommend the SQLDataSource rather than JPA, and especially not spring-roo. SQLDataSource is much much simpler, faster, more powerful and more flexible. We do the best we can simplifying JPA via our JPADataSource, and it's still just not nearly as good as SQLDataSource.

I would really miss spring-roo and jpa annotations: I hate hand made ORM mapping.
What about jpa annotated pojos + SQLDatasource based Datasource? it will be a pain in the neck having to remember column name mappings (well no quite so ... just replace camelization with underscores) beu still better than writing pojons and mantain both datasource and hi.hbm.xmlbernate mappings.

More generally, we would recommend that you figure out what specific problem you are trying to solve with Twitter Bootstrap and which specific features you want to use in what scenarios.

The point with twitter bootstrap was both having a nice ui (many ready made themes) and a responsive html ready for m-site. I think I'll give up on this.

[Isomorphic]

That's a bit of a strange notion of "hand made ORM mapping" which may result from not having read the QuickStart Guide, Server Framework chapter (or not having read it closely enough). The reality is that with SQLDataSource, many steps that are manual in JPA are automatic instead.

You seem to think you'd have to maintain some kind of column name mapping - where or why would you need this?

As far as responsive UI and mobile friendliness - mobile friendliness is automatic, and our layouts make it possible to easily rearrange things for different devices.

However see also the SmartGWT.mobile framework and the FAQ items about it. Handset UIs are often so different that "responsive design" cannot bridge the gap between the desired handset vs the desired desktop UI. This is especially true for large enterprise applications, which is very clearly not what Twitter Bootstrap targets.