Need help in Architecture design in java

Question

Can anyone help in architecture design of one of my complex application.

Requirement : In web based application, we need to generate Excel kind of report as HTML page and after that we need to perform different kinds of operations like

• Add manual rows
• Delete rows
• Edit rows
• adding comments based on each cell
• viewing the added comments.
• attaching the file based on each cell
• viewing the attached file.
• Collapsible functionality for some of rows

In the process of design we have come up with DB design and application framework is Spring. and for Web not yet finalized. what is the best approach to implement this kind of UI? --JSF?(keep in mind we need to Excel operations like above mentioned operations) -- Any reporting tool which will provide editing functionality?

Please suggest me How can we do it? and what is the best technology for it? or is there any reporting tools?

Answer 1

Using the JSP displaytag will help in adding/deleting/editing tables like in Excel. A good demo is here http:// demo.raibledesigns.com/appfuse/demos/users-edit.jsp

Not clear about your attaching file usecase - can you elaborate?

Answer 2

try out extjs as your presentation this can be incorporated with struts or spring mvc, it has a very rich UI library which would enable you to do all kind of operations, alternatively you can also use AJAX with DWR, DWR has its own ways of populating the grids and do different operations, GWT, Flex are also some of the product.. i believe it all depends on the comfort level you have with any framework. I am a little oxymoron regarding the use of displaytags at times :-) so often seek for better options.

Answer 3

Sounds like ExtJS (it's a Javascript framework) might work for you. Check out the samples and demos page on their website, especially the Grids. ExtJS Grids offer quite a lot of functionality.