From Java GUI to Java Web

Question

I've been doing quite large application recently with Java - Swing. Now I'd like to move to web. Basically - I am not Microsoft guy, Java is fine with me. I've checked some basics of Java EE framework and decided that my choice will be Spring. I already am familiar with JDBC. Learning Spring is one thing, but working just with GUIs (C++ and Java) means that I have very poor knowledge of web development.

Before I start reading tutorials of Spring MVC, what should I know to develop web solutions? I am mainly interested "how to" with graphics ... start from scratch or some nice IDE RAD-like development ? I kind of like f.e. Silverlight and integrating to web or asp.net win forms - allows us 'GUI' people develop faster. So can you please give me some useful advices?

Thanx

Answer 1

In web, the GUI is mainly done by CSS. You can find here a quick CSS tutorial/reference. You get here some ideas of the capabilities of CSS. The "raw" UI part is done by plain HTML, which are in case of a Java EE webapplication usually served up from good old JSP files or in case of JSF, Sun's own MVC framework, also from XHTML files, powered by Facelets.

Talking about JSF, there exist several rich UI component libraries which can be used on top of JSF, such as RichFaces (showcase here) and IceFaces (showcase here). With those libraries you don't need to pull the hairs out to do the CSS based look'n'feel work.

Spring MVC doesn't offer any rich UI component libraries like that. Spring is in my honest opinion also obsolete in the improved Java EE 6 API which (finally) offers many Spring-like facilities out of the box.

Answer 2

You might want to check http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/ for some client-side GUI javascript code compilationn from Java language. The code might even look like Swing in a way :)

Another thing of note is, perhaps you might want to use something like Hibernate with Spring instead of using JDBC.

Answer 3

Before you start learning Spring, consider Grails. It is built on top of Spring and Hibernate and it is much easier to learn and use. Grails use Groovy, but if you know java, learning groovy is very fast. Developing Java EE or Spring apps is just too painful and boring. And you can use grails with NetBeans or Eclipse.