Saturday, August 27, 2016

Wise GUI on WildFly

Wow, last post here is almost 3yrs old... sorry.. anyway, time for a quick update!
After I released the Wise webgui in 2013, the idea of a GUI allowing easily invoking webservices endpoints was appreciated quite a lot.
Needless to say, I thought about having it available in JBoss AS / WildFly by default a lot of time ago (way before eventually releasing the gui ;-) ), so the fact the web application was well received convinced me to make a proposal for including Wise in the container. However, that task has constantly been on hold because of more urgent and relevant stuff to work on... and we also got some not-so-good feedback on the choice of using JSF/RichFaces for the GUI.
More recently, Rebecca joined the Wise team and offered to work on an alternative and GWT based implementation of the GUI; she also tried to gather and consider any feedback that would have likely turned into a requirement for the GUI inclusion in the container.
Time passed by and eventually a new gwt-gui was released in June this year; then we tried again pushing on the container integration...and here we are today :-)
A pull request for including Wise by default in WildFly has been merged upstream on master few hours ago.
Here are the steps for playing with the new GUI directly on WildFly :-)

  • Checkout WildFly master on GitHub and build it
  • Add a management user to the container distribution that's created in dist/target directory
  • Boot the container (standalone, default configuration)
  • Open up a web browser on http://localhost:8080/wise
  • Login with the above created user credentials
  • Enjoy :-) (test any locally deployed WS endpoint or any available online, for example this one)

The container inclusion work has allowed us to find out a bunch of bugs and possible improvements of the GUI... as a matter of fact many issues has already been fixed on JIRA and a new release of both core and gwt gui is coming soon. So stay tuned (and report any bug you find)!