Welcome Chet Haase and Romain Guy

This week, we're delighted to have Chet Haase and Romain Guy helping to answer questions about the book Filthy Rich Clients.

The promotion starts Tuesday, September 18th 2007 and will end on Friday, September 21st 2007.

We'll be selecting four random posters in this forum to win a free copy provided by the publisher, Prentice Hall.

Please see the Book Promotion page to ensure your best chances at winning!

Posts in this welcome thread are not eligible for the drawing.

[ UD: fixed date to be in September instead of August ]

[ September 18, 2007: Message edited by: Ulf Dittmer ]
[ DOM: fixed the name. D'oh ]

[ September 18, 2007: Message edited by: David O'Meara ]
[ September 21, 2007: Message edited by: David O'Meara ]

Thanks to Jesper Young for correcting the name. My appologies

In a time where web 2.0 framework is the popular choice for creating software applications, What do you think is the advantage of using Desktop based rich clients in an enterprise ?
[ September 18, 2007: Message edited by: George Sanchez ]

You probably won't like my answer but here it is: it depends on the application

We have an application that was written as an applet, basically using Java Swing components. It rich client application placed placed in the web for easy access. We were looking to re-write it as a web 2.0 using Google Web Toolkit and i know it is going to take lots of hours trying to convert it.
Would you recommend using the new version of Swing and port it over the web as an alternative approach to save us some hours ?

Thanks.

Porting's an awful lot of work, regardless of the platforms you're porting between. What do you stand to gain? What is it about the applet model that is not working for you?

Swing is still an excellent platform for writing and deploying applications, so unless there's some specific reason to move, it seems like gratuitous development effort.

Note that there are also other deployment models if there's something about the applet model specifically that is not right for you (although GWT is obviously browser-based as well, so that doesn't seem to be the issue). For example, Java Web Start has a more flexible deployment model in general and may be worth looking into (at a much lower development cost than switching UI toolkits). You can still deploy through the browser, but the application runs standalone.

Those are some pretty high level (and potentially, therefore, useless) pointers. As Romain says, it depends on your application.

Chet.

Thanks a lot. More power on your book.

I've only had the pleasure of flipping through the book briefly but (aside from the horrible typesetting that plagues Sun books) looks like a good read. Rich clients are very tempting but what would you say is a good way to test rich client apps for minimum system requirements for client machines...

Both accounts have been updated with the 'author' status.
Enjoy your stay

For production softwares, what kind of richness Swing can bring that Web 2.0 frameworks wont be able to ?
Also, if Swing is a desktop solution kit then why dont we see a lot of interesting widgets or interfaces recently ?

Please ask questions in a new thread. Questions in this thread are not eligible for the book promotion.

Hello to both authors. A week I go, or so, I posted this question. Could you help me with this subject?

Hello, I been looking for a data grid table that could be useful for sorting, exporting, and ordering data, the same way it can be done with some data grids available in Delphi or .Net

I have already found some grids with sorting capabilities, such as jxtable provided by http://swinglabs.org/. But that table does not have exporting and sorting (where you drag a column and the rest of columns are displayed based on the ordering column key) capabilities

Any recommendations?

Thanks a lot