What is the Development Environment for SmartClient

[kumarsoft]

Hi,

We are evaluating SmartClient for AJAX application. I went through your Quick Start guide, SmartClient Reference and Explorer. I am trying to understand what is the development environment SmartClient providing to develop Ajax pages.

I tried the Visual Builder, but it is very basic and it is not of much use(for ex. saving the code written in generated code is not possible, also event code I am writing is not saving even after apply button is pressed).

Also is it possible to use the Eclipse to view the SmartClient's components and events and other library future.

thanks
Muthu.

[Isomorphic]

Hello Muthu,

For editing server-side Java code. You can use any standard Java environment, including Eclipse.

Note that Visual Builder is intended for simple prototypes only, as we say in many places, it is not an IDE.

We do provide an Aptana-based plugin for Eclipse that helps with writing JavaScript - see the Isomorphic blog post about it.

You can also connect SmartClient to .NET, PHP and other servers via WSDL or via REST services. In this case you don't need any Java specific tools and can use any text editor, including Visual Studio.

Finally, unless you are proficient in JavaScript, you should consider using SmartGWT, which allow you to write your UI in Java, which can be more familiar to developers with a background in Java, C# or other strongly typed languages.

[kkwong]

Sometimes I ran into issue with duplicate component id. Are there any tools that will catch this problem? build time?

[Isomorphic]

These are prominently reported in the Developer Console, which you should always have open when developing with SmartClient.

Note that you can also eliminate the use of global ids by building all of your interfaces as custom components (see QuickStart Chapter 9).