Category: Development

Matt Raible has a post about his experience with Ajax using DWR and Spring here. The demo video looks really slick, and it seems he has mostly good experiences with this. As always I’m concerned with the cross browser and maintainability stuff, but I havn’t really looked into how to handle this. I might look into trying some small snippets with DWR, I guess you can offload most of the work to the server, and do some pretty simple stuff in JavaScript to avoid most browser issues.

There’s an article about SiteMesh here.

I haven’t tried it out yet, but I’ll my sure to include it in my test project. I’m currently doing a small project to test new ideas and products. Many of the ideas I’m exploring is based on the excellent Domain Driven Design book by Eric Evans.

Products on my test schedule include:

• Hibernate 3
• Spring Framework
• Spring WebFlow
• SiteMesh

Finding a good domain model, combining it with good products and using the products correctly is a hughe challenge. I hope I’ll get it mostly right one day. 😉

DWR (Direct Web Remoting) is a library that lets you do AJAX style calls to your beans wrapped on the server side by a Servlet. It seems like it dynamically creates javascript functions corresponding to you bean methods. Neat. I’ll have to take a closer look at it later. Of course you’re still stuck with handling much of the browser compatibility issues when modifying your DOM with new data, but it does have some utils that should make it easier.