Rational for Errai & GWT over JSF

[Justin Wyer]

Hey Lincoln, looking at the project history it looks as if the project may have gone either way but in the end Errai & GWT won out, if you have a minute could you explain the choice?

I figure you had good reasons and I want to learn what those are :)

Thanks!

Justin

[Lincoln Baxter, III]

Hey Justin!

I felt that I had reached the limit of what JSF could offer me in terms of Rich UI. It was slow, difficult to use, and frustrating when I ran into bugs in the implementation or oversights in the technology in general (html5 support for example.) So I decided to go with an technology that is more native, more responsive, and more limitless: GWT & Errai.

I think the programming model is much nicer.

Kind of stalled right now. Need some motivation. What should I work on next in SocialPM?
~Lincoln

--
Lincoln Baxter, III
http://ocpsoft.org
"Simpler is better."

[Justin Wyer]

Thanks for that reply Lincoln it is very insightful. Well I got SocialPM built and I will hopefully have time to play around with it tomorrow.

I have some feelings about the current state of PM tools:

1. Commercial tools are mediocre and can be expensive.
2. There are a complete lack of open source projects in this space.
3. The best PM tool should be an open source one!

I really believe in OSS and its pretty sad that a great contender has not be created by the community.

One of the points in the vision was that SocialPM is not an issue tracker, I would like to find out more about that looking at the Feature -> Story -> Task classes how do you see life cycle integration for these with external issue trackers and which would you external issue tracker do you think SocialPM should support first in the interest of dog food +1 for github support ;)

Hopefully with your reply and some more time poking the application I'll have some ideas for you!

On Wednesday, July 4, 2012 6:11:55 PM UTC+2, Lincoln Baxter, III wrote:

Hey Justin!

I felt that I had reached the limit of what JSF could offer me in terms of Rich UI. It was slow, difficult to use, and frustrating when I ran into bugs in the implementation or oversights in the technology in general (html5 support for example.) So I decided to go with an technology that is more native, more responsive, and more limitless: GWT & Errai.

I think the programming model is much nicer.

Kind of stalled right now. Need some motivation. What should I work on next in SocialPM?
~Lincoln

[Lincoln Baxter, III]

Hey Justin!

Your response is hugely motivational :) And actually I do want github support! I think we should probably have a few things:

1. Sign up and log in with github
2. Integrate with github issue tracker so that issue numbers become links, etc...
   
3. Integrate with github POST hooks (or something like it) to add relevant commits to the story history log.

By all means, we don't need to stick to the Project -> Story -> Task relationship, it's just the typical relationship for Agile projects, but we could represent that a number of ways in the database. In fact, it would probably be best if we had a more abstract representation, but I wanted to start with something simple first.

What do you think?

Looking forward to your feedback!
~Lincoln

[Lincoln Baxter, III]

Also I completely agree. I'm totally disappointed by the lack of good open-source PM tools. I think we can make something awesome and get a good community going around it :)

[Justin Wyer]

Hey Lincoln, points 1, 2 & 3 sounds great. I also think that the data could be more abstract but we may just over engineer right now so a simple approach is best, we can always change it up later, once there is some feedback from real users.

[Lincoln Baxter]

Yeah I had the same thoughts.

Also, I actually tried to get the code deploying on my new dev laptop. But I ran into some problems with eclipse. Are you able to deploy and run successfully?

[Justin Wyer]

Yeah I had my fork deploying, on a AS7 I built off of master last week, I see you pushed some changes will try with those on my PC here at home. Maven is just dl'ing the internet quick!

I did not deploy from Eclipse I can't use that IDE :P I did however deploy it from a war I built.

[Justin Wyer]

Hey Lincoln I installed jboss dev studio 5 and I found your deploy problem, it seems when I imported socialpm into eclipse the following file got created

gwt/src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/faces-config.xml

This completely foobars the deploy, just delete it and you should be good to go.

On Monday, July 9, 2012 4:24:47 PM UTC+2, Lincoln Baxter wrote:

[Lincoln Baxter]

OK thanks. I'll give that a shot. I seemed to be running into strange issues in jboss tools.