I'm looking for some recommendations from the hard-core GWT users out
there. I'm sure my requirements are not unique.
What is the best way to set up a modular web application that features
GWT?
There, that's the one-sentence question in case this has been answered
many times before--so do please feel free to point me somewhere else.
Bear in mind general web-application organizational principles are
heartily welcomed as well--that is, GWT may not really be terribly
relevant here, but it seems like its organizational principles would
constrain any solution.
A little more background:
The application I'm working on is actually many applications. Prior
to this new direction, each application was in charge, fully, of its
own UI. We're heading down a path where really what we want is for
each application to be "housed" in a common "housing". The housing
would be in charge of governing the navigation between areas of the
overall application. So it's sort of like portlets, but without the
baggage that implies--the "housed" applications wouldn't look like
little windows, and there wouldn't be lots of them on the page;
probably only one or two.
What I'd like to do in a vacuum is {handwave handwave} make a bunch of
web applications, one per "portlet", and then also {handwave handwave}
make the housing web application as well, and somehow merge them
together or otherwise cause the housing to pull in the parts.
I'd also like those parts to be standalone, so that, for example, I
could build an individual war file and test it standalone, knowing
that I'd be giving up navigation and other services provided by the
housing, and that the UI provided by the "part" would obviously be
devoid of common elements (like headers, navbars, footers and the
like).
What I don't want to do, unless I simply don't have a choice, is to
have one giant .war file that represents my whole application. I've
worked with that model before at a large financial institution, and
it's just cumbersome and unwieldy. I'm hoping that there's some
clever solution out there I haven't thought of whereby several web
applications could be "joined" together by the "housing" part, i.e.
you would launch the (skinny) housing application, and it would
{handwave handwave} pull in content sourced from other web
applications (or, from its perspective, I guess, simple URLs).
(In case it matters, I'm using Maven and the gwt-maven-plugin, but
I've got that working so that it works with the existing project
structure that GWT requires. I mention this because Maven has support
for .war file overlays which may come in handy here--where at compile
time you are able to mix together two or more .war files into a sort
of composite war file.)
Thanks for your patience if you've read this far, and I'm looking
forward to the recommendations that are sure to follow.
Best,
Laird
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