And I have EXACTLY the same question. We develop and maintain quite a huge application with two frontends - html WebObjects for extranet users and Java Client for intranet. For JC we used the NIB-Based IB development, although with quite a lot of hacks to force it to work the way we needed. Now we have about 50 interfaces to rebuild.
And we have to decide, where to go from now on.
- Whether try to continue the JC way, using the *distributed* wo libraries together with some third party GUI builder for Swing or SWT or even GWT interfaces (by the way - if you, Dave or John would give me just some few hints about the bindings of these libraries with pure Swing or SWT interfaces, I would greatly appreciate that). Personally I think that this would be a bit easier to code for the moment, but definitively we need to know what will happen with all these .distributed. libraries in the future.
- or whether go the WO app server + Web Services + not_WO client (for example Flex) path. This seems to me a bit more complicated for the moment, as we would need to completely change the client side logic, and add the Web Services layer to the server. Also I have some little doubts about the performance of this solution. But it would free us from this *will it be or will it not be* (deprecated) dilemma, at least as long as the whole WO world is not deprecated ;)
So, please, if somebody has an answer concerning the future of JC internal libraries, let us know!
Thanks!
Jaroslav
Okay, I have the same question as John and Flor, and I don't think it's been answered yet. For those of you NOT doing regular Java Client (I guess there a few ;) there have been THREE ways of doing WO JC development in the past:
1) D2JC 2) NIB-Based using Interface Builder 3) Straight Swing (not using NIBs, rules files, or any other cool, but depreciated tech)
1 and 2 have be obviously depreciated, even if they can be tricked into working. That's not the question.
The question is, is #3 still a viable option? Saying either 1 or 2 still work with some hacking only confuses the question. Are the libraries that maintains the editing contexts on the client side and their communication back to the server-side UNdepreciated, or is it included in the libraries depreciated as part of D2JC and Nib-Based JC?
Does anyone have a definitive answer to this? (please don't invoke curses such as "AJAX" in your answer!)
Thanks!
Dave
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