GWT and Websphere Commerce?

Question

In one of our projects we have reached the point where we have to ditch out old Madisson-based platform and move on. Unfortunately, Aurora does not look like a perfect fit, so we are looking at alternatives.

One option is to build a GWT based front end. This would allow us to drop JSP, Dojo and most JavaScript in favor of a Java-based platform.

Has anybody tried anything like this before?

How would I make it work with for example Dynacache?

Answer 1

I would read this redbook. It has an example of how to code the JSPs - http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg247393.pdf.

Also if you're moving to FEP6, you'll also want to use the WebSphere Commerce tag libraries and some of the metatags so that the inline editing and some of the advanced store preview features work correctly.

Finally, I would engage your local IBM technical team since there are other customer who have done this before and you want to learn from their best practices.

Answer 2

I've no experience with IBM starter stores. I'll try to help, though.

The back-end/front-end integration occurs by putting RPC servlets in a package shared by your back-end and front-end code, as explained here. It shouldn't be a problem to set that up.

I've no idea if dynamic caching will still work, but those RPC calls are also based on URL and I don't see why the cache wouldn't work for them if you set that up properly.

If you don't want to rewrite all your client from scratch and for a step-by-step migration, you could keep your JSP and use little GWT modules to replace the Dojo/js code on your pages.

In the same way your old Dojo/js code can be called from the GWT module if you would like to keep some parts of it.

Hope it helps...

Answer 3

I am not gonna ask you why you want to drop Madison starter store JSPs/DOJO apis and javascript, But that will be massive amount of work for you !

I guess you need to architect your calling from GWT to Server side to be like RESTfull format and can take parameters and add the dynacache entries like servlet/Rest paths that way you can cache the responses from back end which can be JSON or XML format . and of-course that will work

e.g:

 <cache-entry>
        <class>servlet</class>
        <name>/path/GetCatalogs</name>
        <property
name="save-attributes">false</property>
        <property name="store-cookies">false</property>
        <timeout>3600</timeout>
        <priority>3</priority>
        <cache-id>
                <component id="storeId" type="parameter">
                        <required>true</required>
                </component>
                <component id="catalogId" type="parameter">
                        <required>true</required>
                </component>
        </cache-id>
...
</cache-entry>