Swing with struts

["Michael C. Lee Jr." <ml...@hotmail.com>]

This is an architecture question.
I can't determine if this is OT or not so, if you think it is, just respond
with [OT] in the subject.
I have an app I'm going to write. I LOVE a lot of the niceties J2EE provies
you. Technologies I would like/need are sessions, secure communication,
security. I have a struts/J2EE app now and with the new app would like the
same model. Problem is, I also want to make a swing front end to add some
nice gui also because, lets face it, the web interface can be limited. How
much can I reuse? I'm thinking I can't do anything with the JSP layer
(obviously) and am worried I can't even use the struts layer since
transitions will be between Swing GUI screens, not urls per-se. About the
most I can think of is I'm going to have to have some JAAS security,
maintain user state myself and call an EJB directly using JAAS. I don't know
how I would do this securely (I can generate a certificate).

As a side note, due to the extremely cheap nature of this product to the end
customer, all free tools are needed. I've decided on Tomcat, JBoss, struts
and am not sure about the database. I was reading that MySQL is 440$ if you
plan to include it in a commercial product unless you release your source
code in a GNU open source environment as well. Is this true? I may just go
to PostgreSQL which is under the BSD license. I can't sell my product for
400$ a pop if I have to pay 440$ to MySQL.

Any suggestions are welcome.
thanks,
Michael Lee

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[OT] db licensing (was: Swing with struts)

[Chris Winters <cw...@optiron.com>]

Michael C. Lee Jr. wrote:
> As a side note, due to the extremely cheap nature of this product to the end
> customer, all free tools are needed. I've decided on Tomcat, JBoss, struts
> and am not sure about the database. I was reading that MySQL is 440$ if you
> plan to include it in a commercial product unless you release your source
> code in a GNU open source environment as well. Is this true? I may just go
> to PostgreSQL which is under the BSD license. I can't sell my product for
> 400$ a pop if I have to pay 440$ to MySQL.

IANAL, but IIRC you only need to pay the MySQL license if your 
product depends solely on MySQL. That is, if you use Hibernate or 
some other O/R tool and can swap out MySQL for PostgreSQL then you 
don't depend solely on MySQL and thus don't have to pay the license.

That said, in addition to PostgreSQL you might look into FirebirdSQL 
for use in a distributable solution.

Chris

--
Chris Winters (cwinters@optiron.com)
Java Developer





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Re: Swing with struts

["Craig R. McClanahan" <cr...@apache.org>]

On Tue, 13 May 2003, Michael C. Lee Jr. wrote:

> Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 11:09:40 -0400
> From: Michael C. Lee Jr. <ml...@hotmail.com>
> Reply-To: Struts Users Mailing List <st...@jakarta.apache.org>
> To: Struts Users Mailing List <st...@jakarta.apache.org>
> Subject: Swing with struts
>
> This is an architecture question.
> I can't determine if this is OT or not so, if you think it is, just respond
> with [OT] in the subject.
> I have an app I'm going to write. I LOVE a lot of the niceties J2EE provies
> you. Technologies I would like/need are sessions, secure communication,
> security. I have a struts/J2EE app now and with the new app would like the
> same model. Problem is, I also want to make a swing front end to add some
> nice gui also because, lets face it, the web interface can be limited. How
> much can I reuse? I'm thinking I can't do anything with the JSP layer
> (obviously) and am worried I can't even use the struts layer since
> transitions will be between Swing GUI screens, not urls per-se. About the
> most I can think of is I'm going to have to have some JAAS security,
> maintain user state myself and call an EJB directly using JAAS. I don't know
> how I would do this securely (I can generate a certificate).

You're probably not going to like my answer (related to "swing front
end"), but ...

There are some very significant differences between an HTTP+Browser client
environment and a "rich client" environment that you wouls see (for
example) with JavaWebStart+Swing.  These differences are so substantial --
and, IMHO, related more to the underlying communications protocol than the
fact that you're talking about Java solutions versus some other language
-- that I'm skeptical that *any* framework can provide you truly scalable
and flexible single-source support across these two environments.  Quite
simply, they are basically and fundamentally different, and you need to
design your user interaction paradigms with those differences in mind.

That being said, there's lots of room for recycling business logic --
which you can expose via everything from JDBC to web services.  But I am
*not* a believer that you can succeed with a strategy of sharing a UI
framework across these two *very* different environments.  You'd be much
better off to focus on harvesting the reusable business logic portions of
your design early in the analysis stage, and just plan on deploying
technology-dependent front ends on it (Struts being great for an
HTML-browser based client, but not so good for anything else).  That way,
you can reuse your business logic for web services as well.

>
> As a side note, due to the extremely cheap nature of this product to the end
> customer, all free tools are needed. I've decided on Tomcat, JBoss, struts
> and am not sure about the database. I was reading that MySQL is 440$ if you
> plan to include it in a commercial product unless you release your source
> code in a GNU open source environment as well. Is this true? I may just go
> to PostgreSQL which is under the BSD license. I can't sell my product for
> 400$ a pop if I have to pay 440$ to MySQL.
>

You should really be asking these questions to your attorney, not to the
Struts user list :-)

> Any suggestions are welcome.
> thanks,
> Michael Lee
>

Craig McClanahan

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