Migrating JTAF to JavaScript and REST

17 years ago I developed the first version of JTAF. Java Track And Field is an administration tool for track and field competitions. The Turnverein Erlach organizes every year a kids track and field competition and we have 2 to 3 CIS (Concours Intersection) also competitions for kids every year.

The first version of JTAF was an Excel app with VBA. After a few years JTAF was migrated to Access 2.0 and when I started the first Eclipse RCP application in 2005 at Swiss Railways I decided to do a complete redesign of JTAF using Eclipse RCP. See

JTAF is currently a single user application. All data is stored in an XML file. But if the competitions are growing we need multi user capabilities. Therefore I decided to do a compete redesign of JTAF.

I will use JavaScript/HTML5 on the client side and on the server side Java EE 6 with a REST interface that provides access to the date and consumes and produces JSON.

I think this architecture is the future architecture of all web based - and when we look at Windows 8 - also desktop based client applications.

If you like to see the progress of the development feel free to clone the Git repository: https://github.com/simasch/jtaf

If you have any suggestions or questions concerning the architecture please ask. 

Btw. I don't care about browser backward compatibility because I think that these days and also in the near future it is mandatory to use the newest browsers. I personally prefer Chrome because it implements the most HTML5 features. See: http://html5test.com/

I will post regularly about the progress of JTAF. Stay tuned!

JHCR implements ROCA

I developed a small web app using JavaScript, HTML, CSS and REST. It's an implementation of ROCA style and I call it JHR: https://github.com/simasch/jhcr/

Learning JavaScript and ROCA

Currently I'm learning JavaScript and HTML5. Why you may ask. Because I think that it is the only right way to create web applications.

For years I developed web applications with frameworks like JSP, Struts, JSF, PHP or ASP.NET. And all these frameworks are generating HTML code on the server.

With JSF you have a lot of component frameworks like PrimeFaces, RichFaces etc. hiding the JavaScript stuff behind a more or less simple programming model. But is that the way to do it?

I think no. If you want to create responsive web applications you must develop on the client side. And the client side means HTML and JavaScript.

When we look at Java EE or other server side frameworks we will find the perfect server interface for such applications: REST with JSON. So there is no need to do any conversion on the client side.

When I was think about my ideas and developing a sample application one of my colleagues pointed me on ROCA. And I completely agree with all recommendations! So have a look: http://roca-style.org/

Interview about QLRM on JAXenter

http://it-republik.de/jaxenter/artikel/Query-Language-Result-Mapper-1.0-Persistenz-mit-JPA-und-nativen-SQL-Queries-5853.html

QLRM is available in Maven Central

<dependency>
  <groupId>ch.simas.qlrm</groupId>
  <artifactId>qlrm</artifactId>
  <version>1.0</version>
</dependency>

More information about QLRM

SQL Result Mapper is now QLRM

Because the SQL Result Mapper can also map JPQL results I renamed it to QLRM - Query Language Result Mapper.

https://github.com/simasch/qlrm

SQL Result Mapper 0.1.0 in Maven Central Repository

I just released version 0.1.0 of my and it is now available from Maven central repository.

More details on GitHub: https://github.com/simasch/sqlresultmapper