Framework/toolkit for single page Grails app - suggestions please

[graham]

I'm starting up some Grails work and having coded our own nearly single-page Ajax app for the previous Grails work a couple of years ago I was wondering whether any frameworks around now are worth considering - to do some of the hard repetitive work, of course.
It may not be a strictly single-page app with all the pages Ajaxed (in one way or another) but certainly there will be a number of domain classed that would have a common UI, in style and features at least, and these would be candidates for the 'single-page' approach.

I was prompted by the post about Angularjs - in fact I had made a search of javascript frameworks a couple of months ago and didn't see that one.

thanks

graham

[Roberto Guerra]

You have to try them yourself and make a decision based on your personal experience.

I like knockoutjs for very simple applications. I'm currently experimenting with Emberjs and I prefer that over Backbonejs. But that is all based on my personal experience. 

I can't say you should choose only these for your projects. It would be irresponsible of me. Try them and use what makes you most productive (and is more fun too) .

On Sat, Jun 23, 2012 at 2:05 PM, graham <[hidden email]> wrote:

I'm starting up some Grails work and having coded our own nearly single-page
Ajax app for the previous Grails work a couple of years ago I was wondering
whether any frameworks around now are worth considering - to do some of the
hard repetitive work, of course.
It may not be a strictly single-page app with all the pages Ajaxed (in one
way or another) but certainly there will be a number of domain classed that
would have a common UI, in style and features at least, and these would be
candidates for the 'single-page' approach.

I was prompted by the post about Angularjs - in fact I had made a search of
javascript frameworks a couple of months ago and didn't see that one.

thanks

graham


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[graham]

Thanks - but the trouble with "trying them" is that there must be at least twenty 'well-known' such frameworks with probably at least as many again less common - to try them all would take quite a while...

I was hoping that some may have replied with indications of what worked well in conjunction with Grails - that's one of the problems, trying to get the most from two separate tools which are really quite independent.

thanks anyway

graham

[Ian Roberts]

On 27/06/2012 21:51, graham wrote:
> Thanks - but the trouble with "trying them" is that there must be at least
> twenty 'well-known' such frameworks with probably at least as many again
> less common - to try them all would take quite a while...
>
> I was hoping that some may have replied with indications of what worked well
> in conjunction with Grails - that's one of the problems, trying to get the
> most from two separate tools which are really quite independent.

I've used GWT pretty successfully in the past.  It's not everyone's cup
of tea but as a Java programmer rather than a web developer it works
well for me.

Ian

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[tomas lin]

Why not just try angular and switch to something else if it doesn't work.

It is fairly well documented, doesn't depend on a backend stack ( like
Opa, tower.js ), and you already have Rob's scaffolding project as a
project template.



On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 9:51 PM, graham <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Thanks - but the trouble with "trying them" is that there must be at least
> twenty 'well-known' such frameworks with probably at least as many again
> less common - to try them all would take quite a while...
>
> I was hoping that some may have replied with indications of what worked well
> in conjunction with Grails - that's one of the problems, trying to get the
> most from two separate tools which are really quite independent.
>
> thanks anyway
>
> graham
>
>
> --
> View this message in context: http://grails.1312388.n4.nabble.com/Framework-toolkit-for-single-page-Grails-app-suggestions-please-tp4630580p4630738.html
> Sent from the Grails - user mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
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[John Fletcher-3]

2012/6/27 graham <[hidden email]>:
> Thanks - but the trouble with "trying them" is that there must be at least
> twenty 'well-known' such frameworks with probably at least as many again
> less common - to try them all would take quite a while...

I agree.

I found this post really helpful
http://codebrief.com/2012/01/the-top-10-javascript-mvc-frameworks-reviewed/.
The guy seems to know what he's talking about. Ember and Angular are
the ones I will evaluate first when I look into this one day.

John

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[Roberto Guerra]

This isn't ready yet, but I like the concept.

http://yeoman.io

On Thu, Jun 28, 2012 at 8:34 AM, John Fletcher <[hidden email]> wrote:

2012/6/27 graham <[hidden email]>:
> Thanks - but the trouble with "trying them" is that there must be at least
> twenty 'well-known' such frameworks with probably at least as many again
> less common - to try them all would take quite a while...

I agree.

I found this post really helpful
http://codebrief.com/2012/01/the-top-10-javascript-mvc-frameworks-reviewed/.
The guy seems to know what he's talking about. Ember and Angular are
the ones I will evaluate first when I look into this one day.

John

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[John Moore]

Some of the commenters in the article referred to mention the omission of Dojo from consideration. If you decide to go down that path, I'm currently working on a Dojo/Grails system and would be happy to give you some pointers. In a nutshell, Dojo has, I think, a steep learning curve but is VERY comprehensive and VERY powerful. Shallow as I am, it was actually the nice widget set which initially drew me to it :).

[plalloni]

I wonder why ExtJS or SmartClient LGPL are left out of this discussion.

Any reason?

I've used both in different projects, not with Grails though, and results has been _very_ satisfactory, while SmartClient is more comprehensive than ExtJS, the latter seems nicer to work with and has better out-of-the-box look & feel.

Now being thinking about replacing grails default scaffolding with something based on one of these two because we need nicer support for master-detail, filtering, etc. I'm really interesed in knowing the reason, if any, of why are these left aside.

Regards.

2012/6/28 John Moore <[hidden email]>

Some of the commenters in the article referred to mention the omission of
Dojo from consideration. If you decide to go down that path, I'm currently
working on a Dojo/Grails system and would be happy to give you some
pointers. In a nutshell, Dojo has, I think, a steep learning curve but is
VERY comprehensive and VERY powerful. Shallow as I am, it was actually the
nice widget set which initially drew me to it :).

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[John Moore]

I wondered the same thing about Dojo. I came to the philosophical conclusion that it no way indicates any feelings of negativity towards Dojo, merely that there aren't huge numbers of Grails developers in the world,  only a small percentage of those are exploring fully AJAXed web apps, and that there are a lot of Javascript frameworks to choose from. Given that you have to invest a fair amount of time in learning how to work with any given framework, it's entirely possible that not many Grails developers have really looked at Dojo in depth. I'm sure it's the same for ExtJS.

[OverZealous]

I also think that Dojo often has the side effect of being your one-and-only JS framework.  Many other frameworks are lighter, and designed to tag along with jQuery or whatever.  Dojo is a kitchen sink library.

I love Dojo, and have made some amazing single-page apps in the past.  But it's a behemoth of a framework!

I wish there was a "pro" version of the Dojo Grails plugin.  The current one has a lot of really nice features for getting Dojo working quickly, but it's hard to use the build process with it, and the Dojo library version is hard-coded into the plugin.  Right now, I think it's easier to just drop a copy of Dojo into your application and use it "manually".

- Phil

John Moore wrote:
> I wondered the same thing about Dojo. I came to the philosophical conclusion
> that it no way indicates any feelings of negativity towards Dojo, merely
> that there aren't huge numbers of Grails developers in the world,  only a
> small percentage of those are exploring fully AJAXed web apps, and that
> there are a lot of Javascript frameworks to choose from. Given that you have
> to invest a fair amount of time in learning how to work with any given
> framework, it's entirely possible that not many Grails developers have
> really looked at Dojo in depth. I'm sure it's the same for ExtJS.

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[graham]

I had seriously considered using Dojo in a general sense, not to do with single-page apping, but I was wondering if that was best. It is certainly non-trivial and one wonders whether it is worth the effort - after all how much of it would one ever need ?

Re. ExtJS: I did see more than one comment on its licence; and most were less than complimentary. It is certainly (or was a few months ago when I had a look) unusual.

graham

[graham]

Thanks for all the comments.

I'm not sure if I had seen that particular review but I certainly had found a few similar one, but that one was particularly relevant. I think I'll have another search and make yet another list and see how many I find. I'm sure that I can come up with a reasonable list of requirements and, in essence, score the frameworks against those; well, in theory at least.

I'll report...

graham

[John Moore]

OverZealous wrote

I also think that Dojo often has the side effect of being your one-and-only JS framework.  Many other frameworks are lighter, and designed to tag along with jQuery or whatever.  Dojo is a kitchen sink library.

I love Dojo, and have made some amazing single-page apps in the past.  But it's a behemoth of a framework!

I wish there was a "pro" version of the Dojo Grails plugin.  The current one has a lot of really nice features for getting Dojo working quickly, but it's hard to use the build process with it, and the Dojo library version is hard-coded into the plugin.  Right now, I think it's easier to just drop a copy of Dojo into your application and use it "manually".

That's effectively what I've done now. As I've progressed I've tended to 'back out' more and more from the plugin and use Dojo 'manually', as you say. The good thing is that it seems to me that everything you can do with jQuery, you can do with Dojo just as well, once you get used to the slightly different syntax.

This was the page which seduced me  :) originally:

http://archive.dojotoolkit.org/nightly/dojotoolkit/dijit/themes/themeTester.html