Introduction to DWR

There are a number of documents to help you get started with DWR:

• The overview what DWR does
• A list of some of the bigger companies using DWR
• A basic getting started guide (Your first DWR page)
• Some examples to demonstrate basic functionality
• A hints and tips page
• A list of common errors and how to fix them

Outside of this site there is a growing collection of tutorials from around the web.

Configuring the Server

There are various different ways to configure DWR depending on how you like to work:

• The WEB-INF/web.xml configuration options will be useful to all DWR users
• Many people declare what to export using dwr.xml. We also have more detailed documentation on:
  • Creators, Converters and Signatures
• Annotations are available from 2.0, if you don't want to use an XML configuration file
• Spring 2.0 users can configure DWR using Spring Namespaces
• It is also possible to configure DWR using the Fluent Configurator

Comet, a.k.a. Reverse Ajax in DWR 2.0 needs careful configuration to work around the various network problems that can arise.

DWR integrates with many external libraries like Struts, JSF, Webwork, Rife and so on. See the section on integration for more details.

Scripting the Browser

The scripting introduction gets you started with how to write JavaScript code to call your Java code. DWR comes with some small JavaScript libraries to help you:

• engine.js: Handles all server communication
• util.js: Helps you alter web pages with the data you got from the server (and a few neat extras too)
• gi.js: Some small utilities to help plug DWR into TIBCO GI
• auth.js: A library that helps doing authentication using Ajax. This is not officially supported

DWR is not a generic JavaScript library so we try to steer clear of functions that are not specific to remoting functionality, however there are a few functions that sneak into util.js to make life a lot easier.

It is common to need to pass extra data to callback methods and there is also a reference to how to handle errors too.

Other Documents

Things that don't fit into any of the above categories:

• How to write secure code with DWR
• The supported browsers
• The supported environments
• How to upgrade from older versions of DWR
• A section of Ajax documentation which includes help in design and debugging.
• There is also a small collection of generated documents from things like JavaDoc.

A table of contents without descriptions follows: