Level: Intermediate Professor Richard G Baldwin (baldwin@dickbaldwin.com), Professor of Computer Science, Austin Community College
05 Dec 2006 With ThinWire, an open source development framework, you can build Web applications that look and feel like desktop applications. In this five-part series of tutorials, you'll learn how to develop rich Web applications using ThinWire and Java™ programming. In Part 1, you begin the process and learn how to deal with user interface layout issues in ThinWire. You will discover in this tutorial that providing dynamic layout management using the ThinWire framework is a relatively easy thing to do.
In this tutorial
This is one in a series of lessons designed to teach you how to develop rich Web applications using ThinWire and Java code. This first lesson is designed to help you learn how to deal with user interface issues in ThinWire. Historically the development of Web applications has been a complex process. This is due mainly to the requirement of learning and using a variety of technologies, possibly including HTML, JavaScript, XML, ASP.NET, Java servlets, various scripting languages, and so on. Recently several emerging products make it possible to develop Web applications in the Java development environment. Some use Java programming exclusively, while others use Java programming selectively. One development environment that allows you to use Java programming exclusively for the development of Web applications is an open-source development framework named ThinWire (see Resources in the tutorial for more information). All of the code for a ThinWire Web application is written in Java code just as though it is a standalone, event-driven program designed to run on the desktop. It is then compiled into a Web application by the ThinWire framework using the standard Sun javac compiler. A special compiler provided by another vendor is not required.
Objectives - Learn how to deal with user interface issues in ThinWire
- Illustrate a technique that can dynamically change the layout of a GUI based on the current size of the Web browser window
Prerequisites
You will need:
- Knowledge of event-driven programming using the Java programming language as
embodied in Sun's J2SE 5.0 (see DickBaldwin.com in the tutorial's Resources).
- Knowledge of how to deploy a Web application in a Java servlet container (see
"Deployment of Web Applications in Jakarta Apache Tomcat 5" in the tutorial's Resources).
System requirements
You will need JavaScript enabled in your browser. First, download and install the ThinWire framework (see Download in the tutorial). Second, you will need access to a servlet container to test your Web
applications. The easiest way to do this is to install a servlet container as a
localhost server (see Download and also "Getting Started with Jakarta Tomcat, Servlets, and
JSP" in Resources in the tutorial). Third, download Sun's Java Development Kit (see Download in the tutorial).
Duration
1 hour
Formats html, pdf
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