update: example application
I have been writing thick client applications in Java for a while now. You can produce nice applications with Swing if you know how to and have the right tools and libraries at hand. Lately, however, some of our clients made me rethink the approach for thick client development. We were asked to develop a thick client application for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. The customer also pointed out that in the future they would like the same application to be web based. This made me rethink the Swing strategy and bring back an older concept we developed for a customer back in 2000. The project is still online at http://www.tisca.com/tisca-tiara/handtuft/select/en/index.html. It’s an online carpet configurator allowing the customer to color and custom order a carpet. The project was initially delivered over the web but was also distributed to stores on a CD, allowing the store owners to run the application on a local computer without an internet connection. The approach taken was simple: an autostart executable on the CD runs a webserver as well as a web browser without navigation bars, etc, as one application. To the store, the application looks like a thick client, on the web, it’s just another AJAX style web application.
Back to 2010, we know have libraries such as EXTJS that bring an application look and feel to your web application. Out of the box, EXTJS supports more feature rich components than are supported by Java/Swing. Firefox is a great browser and the mozswing project allows you to bundle Firefox into your Java/Swing application. if you combine this with an embedded web server such as Jetty you can write and deliver a thick client application the same way you deliver a web application. The hybrid approach allows you to handle parts of your application such as file dialogs, etc in Swing. Once a user selects a file to load, you can make a javascript call from your Java/Swing application into the MozSwing browser window to communicate back to your local web server to load the file.
Using this technology stack allows us to deliver a rich thick client experience and at the same time reuse most of the code, apart from specific features such as file dialogs.
The following is a screenshot of the current application we’re building:
Please let me know what you think about this approach. If there is enough feedback I’ll follow up this post with an example application for you to play with.
An example implementation can be found here http://ruben42.wordpress.com/2011/06/01/example-thick-client-app-with-extjs-and-java/
