GWT IDE Goodness

Dietrich Kappe, Tuesday, July 15, 2008 @ 2:38 pm

When GWT 1.5 came out, there was a real deficit amongst the IDE's -- all of them were still in 1.4 land. Well, the situation looks a little brighter today.

• First, there is GWT Tooling, a plugin for Eclipse that is supposed to ease development of GWT applications with Eclipse.
• Next, the folks over at Google are themselves working on their own Eclipse plugin. It's not ready yet, but you can see a presentation from the end of June by Bruce Johnson showing off some the GWT Eclipse plugin's features.
• The latest Cypal Eclipse plugin for GWT is supposed to work for GWT 1.5. Haven't tested it myself yet.

On the disappointment side, Jetbrains looks like it's releasing support for GWT 1.5 in it's 8.0 release. Having to wait for a major IDE release for a plugin upgrade is kind of lame.

agile ajax

Comments: 10 so far

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1. 

   I agree: GWT support was half-assed even in the 7.0 release of IDEA, and now they will have production support for GWT 1.5 in a version that won’t be finalized for months. IDEA used to be on the forefront of new features, but they’ve been lagging a lot, since they decided that every half step they do is a new IDE version (…which has to be paid for).

   Comment by Davide Baroncelli, Wednesday, July 16, 2008 @ 7:37 am

2. 

   And what about GWT4NB plugin ? (GWT for Netbeans)

   Comment by fat, Wednesday, July 16, 2008 @ 9:06 am

3. 

   I’ve testing quite a few scenarios before declaring that Cypal Studio works with GWT 1.5. It also creates the Async files appropriately with Generics. Let me know if it doesn’t work in any corner cases. Will be happy to fix it

   Comment by Prakash G.R., Wednesday, July 16, 2008 @ 9:34 am

4. 

   Nothing stops you from using GWT 1.5 in IntelliJ 7.0 actually.
   We successfully migrated to GWT 1.5 about 1 month ago and using IntelliJ 7.0 without any issues.
   There is no WYSIWYG support for the forms design but it was not there for 1.4 either so no big deal.

   Comment by OBender, Wednesday, July 16, 2008 @ 10:05 am

5. 

   @OBender

   I’ve used 7.0 with GWT and while it can be made to work, it falls short in supporting many of the new features. Also, lots of the HTML and XML boilerplate that it generates is now suboptimal for 1.5.

   Comment by Dietrich Kappe, Wednesday, July 16, 2008 @ 6:24 pm

6. 

   @fat

   GWT4NB? I didn’t think that supported GWT 1.5 yet. Do you know otherwise? That would be great news.

   Comment by Dietrich Kappe, Wednesday, July 16, 2008 @ 6:25 pm

7. 

   And don’t forget the GWT-Designer. It’s now supporting GWT 1.5 RC1.

   Comment by alex.d, Thursday, July 17, 2008 @ 1:50 am

8. 

   I use Cypal now and it works well. I will try gwt-pf (http://gwt.org.ua/en/about/), too. There is a nice
   Eclipse readme at: http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit-incubator/wiki/MakingIncubatorBetter.

   Comment by Igor, Friday, July 18, 2008 @ 6:24 am

9. 

   @Dietrich : Yes, GWT4NB supports GWT 1.5. You only have to increase the heap space for GWT compiler, which is reset to default value each time you switch between project, but otherwise it works well. Howerver, I wasn’t able to run my application in Hosted mode, thus I have to compile to JS each time I want to run my application, but this seems to be only a “feature” of GWT on Mac.

   Comment by Pavel Lahoda, Monday, July 21, 2008 @ 9:05 am

10. 

    @Pavel:

    “Works with” and “supports” are two different things. For example, does the automatic code generation for GWT-RPC work with the new Java 1.5 style?

    Comment by Dietrich Kappe, Tuesday, July 22, 2008 @ 11:22 am

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