Willie: Welcome! It sounds like you have an interesting project on your hands, and from what you describe I think Keel might indeed be helpful. The one piece that's missing currently is a fully-developed Swing client for Keel, as most of us had need for web-app type clients initially. A couple of experiments have been made though: Pete (as I think he mentioned) tinkered with a pure Swing client module, and I experimented briefly with a project called "Thinlets", which is kind of a Velocity for Swing, to make a very interesting but long story short.
Keel itself is fully isolated from the client - e.g. it doesn't care what the display technology is: web, PDA, Swing, smoke signals, etc, so it should be a fairly easy job to take one of these clients to completion. As far as security Keel does indeed do what you suggest, and Hibernate is one of the choices for the persistence layer, so that's not a problem. I use MySQL frequently, it's well supported by Keel as well. I'd be happy to assist with working on a Swing UI client - my initial choice would be to use the Thinlet project as a basis, but that's just at a quick look, perhaps "pure" swing would be better. Given my experience doing other clients, I would guess a Swing client would be maybe a couple of weeks work, depending on what percentage time can go into it. If you think something Thinlet-based is a way to go, I'd be happy to check into CVS what I've done with it so far, so you can have a look. The basic idea is that the core classes of the client implement a Request/Response cycle, which then uses a transport layer (you mentioned XML-based - Axis is one choice that's already in Keel), which then talks to the Keel server. The server then does all the "real work" - e.g. talks to the database, etc, then sends a response to the client, and round and round. Good luck with the project, and let me know how I can help. Regards, Mike On Sun, 5 Oct 2003 16:46:58 +1300 (NZDT) "Willie Seabrook" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, > > I'm interested in using Keel in an application I have to build. I am > currently in the research phase determining how best to do it. The > application will replace an old CRM app built in Filemaker for a small > stock broker / financial services provider. Custom (either expaning on the > current filemaker or rebuilding in Java) is the only choice as standard > CRM products are either too expensive, don't run on Mac and Windows or do > not have the customization capabilities that we need. Full J2EE is out of > the question due to high maintance costs and a swing client is a > requirement. Doing this as a web app is out of the question. > > I will be using MySQL database + Hibernate for data persistence and Swing > GUI deployable via webstart for the client. Talking to the server > component via lightweight xml messaging and a bpm tool (my own soap > replacement). > > Would keel be useable here? As far as I can see its JAAS authentication > might be very useful. I'm unfamiliar with security in general and > expecially on the swing client side. (First app to secure a swing > inteface) I need to be able to be able to secure certain fields in some > objects. For example: > > class Client > UID clientId > String firstName > String lastName > Account account > > I need one group to be able to view/edit/delete everything and another > group to only be able to view everything and edit everything except the > Account object. Etc etc etc. > > This sort of task is easy in a webapp environment using ejb or straight > sql but I really have little idea about how to accomplish this in a > swing/hibernate architecture. I have a strong feeling that the Keel > security model might enable this? > > I have searched through the wiki but have only found a couple of pages. > One saying I'd need to write my own swing module or something - how long > would this take? Does Keel have the security features I require? > > Regards, > Willie Seabrook > > http://keelframework.org/documentation > Keelgroup mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://lists.keelframework.com/listinfo.cgi/keelgroup-keelframework.com x Michael Nash JGlobal Ltd. http://www.jglobal.com Bahamas Commerce and Trade http://www.bahamascommerce.com http://keelframework.org/documentation Keelgroup mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.keelframework.com/listinfo.cgi/keelgroup-keelframework.com
