带有Swing和Web GUI的Java App

Question

I need to build a desktop application for internal users for certain business. It also needs web based GUI for external users. I know, with web GUI both internal and external users can access it, but there are certain factors which are outside our control - due to which, desktop application is really unavoidable. For the purpose of this question, I would like to focus on the way to support both Desktop client (Swing) and Browser client.

Are there any best practices to be followed? I could think of below:

1. Expose service classes as web services and use these from both Swing client and web client
2. Expose service classes as EJB (business is into Java EE techs) and use Swing client as EJB client. Web client can use controller classes to interact with EJB

Are there any known benefits of using either approach, apart from technology agnosticism offered by web services?

Also, for swing client, I am thinking of using Java Web Start for easy distribution. I have never used it before, but from what I understood, it can support automatic version check at startup and update the client when required - is this correct?

Answer 1

If you need to avoid dependency to Java/JVM on the browser (which you most likely at least want to), you should definitely go with mixed Swing-Vaadin approach. Build the internal application with Swing or JavaFX and web part with Vaadin. The programming model in Vaadin is so close to typical desktop UI library that it is really easy for the same developers to work with both code base, and naturally you'll use exactly the same backend.

See the example application I recently built to demonstrate a setup like this.