Application Structure
Overview
Mobile applications differ from desktop applications in that rather than having multiple panels visible at once on a large screen, they are typically divided into smaller segments designed to be displayed one at a time on a small screen. Lengthy forms, such as a customer-detail form whose desktop version includes {{ListGrid}}s displaying the customer's past invoices, may be broken up so that the main panel showing the customer's name, contact information, and so on instead has a navigation link to a new panel containing just a list of the invoices (each of which, in turn, is a link to a page showing the invoice ID, date, totals, and so on).
SmartGWT.mobile applications are still GWT applications, however, and the standard application lifecycle is unchanged: Applications declare an entry-point module and set up their top-level interfaces in onModuleLoad()
. Basic History management is built into SmartGWT.mobile without needing any effort from the developer; see below.
Layout and Navigation
Since mobile applications are typically both smaller than desktop applications and more tightly coupled in their navigation structure between panels, the suggested model for navigation is for event handlers to directly invoke navigation methods such as NavStack
's push
and pop
.