[Building Sakai] [Management] Gradebook Situation

[Thomas Amsler]

On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 1:22 PM, Mark Norton <markjnorton at earthlink.net>wrote:

>  On 7/29/2010 1:05 PM, Michael Feldstein wrote:
> > I personally think it's very important for us to support one (though
> preferably only one) server-side UI framework in Sakai 3, and GWT is the
> obvious candidate.
> Why would you nominate GWT for the principle UI framework?  My
> experience with it is that it is brittle and hard to debug.


That's interesting because my experience working with GWT/Gradebook2 is
quite different. GWT by itself, not using third party libraries, is quite
solid. Also, I haven't seen anything as advanced in debugging client side
code to what Eclipse/GWT allows you to do. I would be interested in hearing
a bit more about your negative experience with GWT w.r.t. those two areas.


>  I also note
> that Kuali Student went down the GWT path and is now moving to something
> else (TBD).


At this years Google I/O, I have talked to the Kuali Student developer and
we have exchanged some of our experiences with GWT. Based on that discussion
and the questions that that person asked during the Google I/0 GWT fire side
chat, it seems that they are trying to use GWT to do something for which it
wasn't quite designed to do. Also, keep in mind that if you are using GWT,
you are not looked in to just use GWT on your client side. You can pretty
much use any JavaScript based library, technique alongside.


>  Isn't Sakai moving away from a server side framework
> towards RESTful interfaces like JSON?
>

 I am not sure if you inferring that GWT is a "server side framework"? It is
not. I think that the GWT-RPC server end is the only "server side" part of
GWT. We actually converted gradebook2 to not use GWT-RPC and only use REST
JSR-311 (Jersey). All of our client/server communication is JSON based.


There are as always pros/cons for standardizing on UI frameworks. I think
that as long as we encourage to use REST/JSON for the
client/server communication. We should leave it up to the
tool developers which client side tools, libraries, frameworks they want to
use. I think we should more focus on best practices on how to write robust
client code.


> Sadly, I really don't think we are going to agree on a UI framework.
> We've had discussions on this topic for YEARS without resolution.
>
> -1 for GWT.
>
> FWIW,  Mark Norton
>
>
>
>
>
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