CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaeclipsegwtjetty
GreatFire
GreatFire

Reputation: 437

GWT as part of a non-web application

We have a java server application which runs certain batch jobs. It's core function is not as a web application and there's no reason for it to be that. But we would like to add an option to check what the app is doing from a web page. And we thought this could be nicely done with the Google Web Toolkit.

In any previous experiences we have with GWT we have deployed it on Tomcat. But in this case it seems like overkill. The web part is more of a side function to what the application is actually doing.

I'm thinking of a solution where the web server is integrated into the jar file - perhaps Jetty? So that the full java application can be deployed to a single jar file together with the web/GWT part.

There may be performance aspects to this but the web side of things will have very few users. Are there any other reasons not to do it this way?

And, can you give some advice on how to configure Eclipse / Ant / Jetty / GWT for this?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 238

Answers (1)

Alex K.
Alex K.

Reputation: 3304

we had the similar experience at our previous project. There was an eclipse-rcp application, with embedded Jetty server (it was started programmatically when application was starting). GWT application was deployed into the Jetty as usually. Also there was a OSGI-service as a controller to provide communication between GWT-server and other parts of application. GWT server was usual RCP server, which is described in the most of examples. It had a reference to the controller. Moreover, it was an event listener, to support bot-side communication.

The main problem for us I think, was synchronization problem. Since there were a lot of messages between eclipse-rcp application an GWT-part (every let say 100 ms the message was received) and GWT had an asynchronous way of communication between client part and its server part, then some mechanism had to be created to synchronize those messages. Otherwise there were no performance problems (except IE 6. which had to be supported:S :D).

Hope this will somehow help.

Upd: As far as I remember, the controller was registered as OSGI service only to be able to communicate with other services of Eclipse-RCP part. In order to communicate with GWT controller was implementing special interface, which was known to the GWT-server (Controller was registered as an implementer through instantiation and the server was regsitered in the controller as IMessageListener). This interface was lying in separate project, which could was also built into the .war file. This project also contained number of event to support backward communication from controller to GWT-server through IMessageListener interface.

It's kind of confusing probably, sorry. May be I should draw a diagram..

Upvotes: 1

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