Administration area/backend with GWT

[Pablo Mino]

Hi,

I'm working currently in an app with GWT but I never ever had the chance to build an administration backend, this will allow me to change the application icons and themes dynamically, and also change displayable values of the device as its ip , name and other attributes.

I've seen them in other applications (CMS mostly) and got no idea of where to start. I'm concerned as the design decisions I make at the moment will bite me back when I get to the administration console design.

So before I get to the day where I use and abuse callbacks and static variables... Could someone please point me on the right way to design an administration backend with GWT?

[Maneesh Godbole]

I am not sure I fully understand your question here.
Usually I follow a role based pattern. I define my own roles for my application users. If the user has administrative rights, he is presented with additional options on the UI. Using the UI, the administrator can make whatever changes required.

You mention administration backend. Again I am not sure I understand what you mean here. For a GWT app, everything generates from the backend (server). Why would the administrator backend be any different?

[Pablo Mino]

I apologize for the confusing post. First of I'm using this definition of backend:

"In Web content management systems the terms front end and back end may refer to the end-user facing views of the CMS and the administrative views respectively."

My whole question goes oriented to find out how someone develops "efficiently" an app with GWT where there are widgets in one page that are meant to refresh/change widgets somewhere else. Just really don't know how to approach this.

And ye, roles is also something I got to consider. I know how I could check for the role, but then how you tell the site to behave differently?

[Maneesh Godbole]

Pablo Mino wrote:
My whole question goes oriented to find out how someone develops "efficiently" an app with GWT where there are widgets in one page that are meant to refresh/change widgets somewhere else. Just really don't know how to approach this.

Do you mean to say that the admin changes say the page background color and you want it to be immediately reflected for all other currently logged in users?

Pablo Mino wrote:
I know how I could check for the role, but then how you tell the site to behave differently?

Something like

if(UserRole.ADMIN.equals(user.getRole()))
    showAdminControls();

[Pablo Mino]

Do you mean to say that the admin changes say the page background color and you want it to be immediately reflected for all other currently logged in users?

Well ye, but not just that, the idea is to have several devices acting like cleints, each one will have a name, images, news, and more contents.

In addition this devices can only submit information to a DB in a server, and only when you log as admin on any of these you are able to delete that information.

All I can think of is having everything under a Timer that constantly check if these values/settings/preferences changed on the server, but it seems like an expensive operation.