SmartClient Best Practices

[ssalmon]

Hello Everyone

Really hope someone could provide some direction. We are just about to embark on our SmartClient Pro journey after successfully using SmartGWT for a couple of internal applications. In SmartGWT we successfully used an MVP pattern and the applications felt robust and worked as intended.

Now that we are starting out with SmartClient I am looking for advise or best practices to follow in correctly architecting a SmartClient application.

I have searched the web, forums etc but cannot find anything concrete on approaches for building solid SmartClient applications.

Our applications will be made up of a series or reasonably complex screens but many are very much form based but plenty of master detail features. Due to the size of functions I can see a requirement to load screens on demand.

I very much look forward to some assistance or guidance from the community.

Thank you.

Steven

[Isomorphic]

It's very unlikely that you will want to load any part of the application on demand, and it's a certainty that loading individual screen on demand will be a major net loss of performance (see the SmartClient Architecture topic for why).

Are you saying that you are moving from SmartGWT to SmartClient, so you will now be coding screens in JavaScript?

[ssalmon]

Thank you for your reply. We no longer want to continue developing directing with SmartGWT. Not that there is anything wrong with the product but our direction is now more Spring MVC/HTML/Javascript focused. SmartClient is more suited.

Any pointers would be really appreciated.

Thank you

Steven

[Isomorphic]

Combining Spring with SmartClient/SmartGWT can make sense (see the lookupStyle:"spring" setting related to DMI), but combining Spring MVC definitely doesn't.

Spring MVC is an older architecture that assumes the server generates HTML for the presentation. SmartClient, SmartGWT and all other modern UI technologies generate HTML for the presentation inside the browser, and contact the server for data only.

If you had an architecture you were comfortable with for arranging your code in SmartGWT, the same architecture applies to SmartClient - it has a class system just like Java's.

The only thing we would caution is don't use Google's MVP pattern. It does not apply to SmartGWT or SmartClient; in both cases you will be replicating a bunch of data binding behavior that is already built into the widgets.