What IDE and frameworks are used by Zimbra staff?

[bwhitehall]

I was curious as to what IDE (eclipse, myeclipse, etc) and frameworks (struts, JSF, velocity, turbine, etc) the Zimbra staff uses to develop/serve the client code.

[KevinH]

Most of us use Eclipse as an IDE. For the client we use the webtools plugins. As for frameworks we don't use any. Just a couple JSP's to launch the app, but once that's going it's 100% Javascript.

[Terpinator]

If there's no framework (i.e. struts, turbine, etc.), but rather just javascript and a couple jsps, then where are calls made to persist data in databases, etc....

[KevinH]

This is where the AJAX comes in. Our client once launched is 100% Javascript. It makes XML requests to our server. So SOAP/HTTP to the back end in an async manner. It fetches and posts back to the server as needed to update the UI and save changes. The XML returned is in JSON format so it's very quick for us to convert the data to Javascript objects.

[Terpinator]

I've got a basic question, I think. I noticed in the Tree example, the parent element is a new DwtShell which takes over the whole browser....

How do I add multiple widgets and have the control of where to put each one ?

[KevinH]

Try this example:

http://www.zimbra.com/forums/showthread.php?t=83

[JavaJosh]

Most of us use Eclipse as an IDE. For the client we use the webtools plugins. As for frameworks we don't use any. Just a couple JSP's to launch the app, but once that's going it's 100% Javascript.

Hi Kevin,

There are a lot of webtools plugins. Which ones can you recommend?

For those that wish to try the webtools out, check out

http://www.eclipse.org/webtools/

Thanks for a cool library,
-- JavaJosh

[KevinH]

http://download.eclipse.org/webtools/downloads/

Pick a stable release and then grab the all-in-one (WebTools Platform; Runtime).

[JavaJosh]

http://download.eclipse.org/webtools/downloads/

Pick a stable release and then grab the all-in-one (WebTools Platform; Runtime).

Yes, I did that, thanks. The one drawback is that its a new copy of Eclipse, but I'll deal with it.

Getting AjaxTk to work using Ant and the war task was very simple. However, I was expecting tighter integration with WTP (e.g. getting interpreted as a "Dynamic Web Project" with all the goodies that entails). I haven't really looked at the build all that closely, so perhaps it's not amenable to "live" deployment.

Indeed, being new to Ajax development my mind is reeling from the fact that there are so few JSP pages, and everything is done in JavaScript. You have ported SWT (and then some) to JavaScript! Holy mackerel!

One issue that I can see is that even the basic examples are very, very heavy - 1MB of script for the Data View example. Any hints for those that must support dialup users?

[KevinH]

One issue that I can see is that even the basic examples are very, very heavy - 1MB of script for the Data View example. Any hints for those that must support dialup users?

You'll see in the prod-deploy targets of our webapp we do several things to reduce the size. Big winner is gzip compression.