Webtrans Architecture
The Translation Editor (Webtrans) is a GWT application that uses . It is distributed from a Zanata server and runs in a browser (Chrome and Firefox are targeted specifically), and uses GWT-RPC to communicate with the server.
The GWT SDK is required to develop this component.
As well as core GWT libraries, webtrans also uses gwt-dispatch, google-guice, gwt-presenter, gwteventservice and gwt-log.
Webtrans uses the MVP software pattern for most of its client-side functionality. In MVP, the Presenter is the main controlling component and performs all interactions with the model, with the view being a lightweight display component with as little control and data manipulation logic as possible.
Zanata uses the gwt-presenter library to handle the connections between the components of MVP. The diagram below illustrates how MVP is approached in Zanata.
For each part of Webtrans there is a Presenter component, a Display interface, and a View component that implements the Display interface. These components usually share a prefix, and use the component type as a suffix, e.g. the document list is handled by DocumentListPresenter, DocumentListDisplay and DocumentListView. In some cases the Display interface is defined within the presenter class, e.g. the project-wide search page is handled by SearchResultsPresenter, SearchResultsPresenter.Display and SearchResultsView. These components are associated with each other in org.zanata.webtrans.client.gin.WebTransClientModule, allowing the View to be injected in the Presenter's constructor.
The Model part of MVP in Webtrans consists largely of calls to the server (using gwt-rpc) to retrieve data, and client-side caches of this data in the form of fields in the presenter.