More GWT Developments

Dietrich Kappe, Tuesday, June 13, 2006 @ 9:00 am

The ferment going on around the GWT is truly impressive. Whether this bubbling activity is caused by all the frustrated Java programmers that this framework has unleashed on Javascript and the browser, or by the Google name that draws people in to take a peek, I can't say. We've already look at the widget sets people have built on top of GWT, but now we're seeing people integrating it with other frameworks and libraries.

Robert Cooper over at O'Reilly's OnJava.com has a nice tutorial that shows how to develop with GWT. The source for the article includes a Maven module that allows you to produce a WAR from your GWT project. Very handy for those wanting to deploy the compiled Javascript and RPC services in one package. The tutorial covers a fair bit of stuff like history support and such. Definitely a must read given the terse and sometimes confusing documentation that comes with GWT.

Luca Masini has done the inevitable: he's integrated GWT with the Spring Framework. For those of you not familiar with Spring, it is the one framework I know of whose main objective is not to provide some functionality, but rather to improve the overall architecture and design of your application. Luca also has a nice article on integrating GWT with struts (and Hibernate, etc.). He's done some good work in making GWT more than just a client-side curiosity.

Ed Burnette over at zdnet has a short tutorial on getting GWT working with Eclipse, which IMHO isn't that hard, but it's always helpful to see how other people have done things. He does provide this valuable avoidance measure on a GWT documentation gotcha:

If you follow Google's Getting Started instructions
it says to just click on the green "Run" button to get your project
started in "hosted" mode, but that's not quite correct. Plus, you'll
want to run the program in Debug mode most of the time anyway. So
select Run > Debug…, and click on the launch configuration titled
MyApplication (under Java Application). Then click on Debug. Two
windows will appear: The GWT Development Shell (this is kind of like a
console window) and the Wrapper HTML window (a special web browser).

For those brave souls wanting to use GWT with PHP (Java to Javascript and PHP with JSON? Yuck! Talk about language confusion.), you can try Juan Hurtado's tutorial (also available in Spanish), which demonstrates how to build an address and phone number database. Or you can try Robert Hanson's blog for useful GWT examples and insights. Or try this blog entry describing the development of a GWT widget.

Tod Liebeck, the lead developer of the Echo2 AJAX framework (server-side GUI component) has an informative article over at The Server Side comparing GWT and Echo2 and setting the record straight on some misconceptions. Specifically,

The most obvious difference between GWT and Echo2 is that all of your
GWT code is executed on the client, whereas your Echo2 code is executed
on the server. There are advantages and disadvantages to both of these
approaches, which will be highlighted throughout the article.

OK, this post is getting kind of long for a simple GWT update, so I'll leave you with some insightful thoughts from Alex Russell over at Dojo:

From where I sit, GWT looks like the physical manifestation of
hiring managers’ frustration when trying to hire for “ajax developer”
or “UI engineer” positions. The truth of the matter is that there just aren’t
very many of us in the world and interestingly, Google employs a fair
number of them. That they did GWT smacks of recruiting desperation and
the need to better leverage the Google SSFPU (super-smart fungible
programming unit).

Turns out you can’t just drop a good hacker into UI programming and
trust that it’ll work out. Not only does someone in the UI engineering
role need to have a solid appreciation for the constraints of the web,
they need to be multi-language clued, know when to defer to visual
designers, have the balls to push back on stupid requirements, and
empathize with users. And that’s the baseline. No wonder Ajax is sexy and hard to hire for. The great apps in the Ajax word are developed by great engineers and designers.

The "multi-language clued" issue is a major one, in my opinion. More on that later.

Related posts:

1. Recent Ajax Framework Releases/Developments
2. Echo2 vs GWT
3. New Echo2 Tutorial Series
4. Some Brief Echo2 Tutorials
5. Framework Watch – ThinWire

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