Use SmartClient in existing Struts Application

Technical Q&A
1

I am evaluating smartclient for converting the UI an existing struts J2ee application. We’ve around 1000+ jsp pages in use, which are written using a mix of struts/jsp taglibs and html tags. We use struts form beans to get form data poulated. I’ve some doubts regarding this.

  1. Is it possible to incrementally convert our existing jsp pages to SmartClient?
  2. Is it possible in smartclient UI to populate form data using struts form bean and struts html tags?
  3. I’m willing to rewrite our jsp pages. But i don’t want to make any major changes to our back end struts classes and business architecture. Is this approach feasible?
  4. Which is a more appropriate product for us: SmartClient or SmartGWT?
  5. Does smartGWT have any struts integration packages since it is written in java?
2

  1. Yes. See this sample

  2. SmartClient forms can be configured to submit data like a normal HTML forms (see dynamicForm.canSubmit)

  3. Yes - find the nearest thing in your system to a secure data services layer (or refactor to create one), and connect SmartClient components to that via DMI or a custom DataSource

  4. Probably SmartClient, since it’s more straightforward to add just one component at a time to an existing page, and to integrate with a pre-existing system that assumes you are doing full page transitions constantly

  5. No (doesn’t really make sense).

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