An Overview of Google Web Toolkit (GWT)

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Comment by Stephen McMahon on September 13, 2009 at 11:56am

I haven't any experience with either of the libraries that you mentioned, although I hear about Spring quite a lot. Pretty much the only Java development that I do at work these days is strictly within GWT and mostly as seasoning to some stone soup I'm brewing ;). I've played around a bit with GAE on my own time to try and learn more servlet and jsp stuff, but lately I've been pretty consumed by my job and haven't had a lot of that 'own time.' Having them mentioned here is more encouragement to learn more.

Comment by Konstantin A Lukin on September 13, 2009 at 9:21am

Ah, looking at the example, both GXT and SmartGWT have DataStore feature with Records that accept XML or JSON data from an url, so then it is possible to provide any server-side implementation for that. It is a handy feature in case one does not have access to a Java servlet container, otherwise servlet probably does a better job at this, since native GWT RPC mechanism allows transparent serialization of full object graphs, including lists and maps.

The problem with RPC is that methods get overcrowded pretty quickly, so it is important to have a good design upfront. Would be curious to hear about different server-side RPC implementations. Do you use any libraries to make things easier, like Spring or Guice?

Comment by Stephen McMahon on September 13, 2009 at 6:33am

I think that you may find most of what you are looking for at this link: http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwt/showcase/#restfulds_xml_integration_category. They have a full CRUD example with source code included there. There is also some very good information on that topic here: http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwt/javadoc/com/smartgwt/client/data/RestDataSource.html. Finally, there is the Record object that you can extend that should make things fit better into DataSources. I can't claim to have a wealth of experience in any of these items, but I expect that will all change within the next month :)

Comment by Konstantin A Lukin on September 13, 2009 at 12:28am

Great! Already having a number of questions, especially concerning RPC data serialization with ASP.NET and how that is handled by SmartGWT.. Could you provide a link where to find more information about this? Thanks.

Comment by Stephen McMahon on September 12, 2009 at 9:00pm

I think that the most challenging thing for me in using a non-Java solution on the server was setting up the GWT environment in Eclipse to point to and operate against my local IIS server. I've managed to configure it to point to IIS from the hosted mode browser, but I've lost my interactive debugging abilities. For this reason I'm really starting to get more interested in the unit testability of GWT apps. Any good blog pointers or examples that you or anybody reading might have in that area would really be appreciated.

I'll plan on posting the details of configuring an Eclipse hosted GWT project at IIS very soon.

Comment by Konstantin A Lukin on September 12, 2009 at 7:24pm

That sounds really slick! Just created a 'Google Web Toolkit' group to share developer ideas, would love to hear in more detail about alternative server-side supporting technologies and how they can be integrated with GWT. Thanks!

Comment by Stephen McMahon on September 12, 2009 at 5:57pm

It will take some more time before I convince them to let me implement gears but I've certainly kept it in mind as our largest application is a partially connected tool. Our only options for the server side are ASP.NET and ColdFusion. The reason that I went with SmartGWT is because of how easily I can manage the server side by either using ASP.NET MVC apps or WCF services -- depending on the complexity of the app. I've been following your GWT related posts and wondering how long it will be before we have a regularly scheduled GWT Users Group at the MIC :). I'd gladly contribute!

Comment by Konstantin A Lukin on September 12, 2009 at 4:10pm

Hi Stephen, frameworks you've mentioned are probably the major ones. There are also smaller projects, such as gwt-log, that nicely solves logging problem, especially when deploying to remote servers.

Like you mentioned, GWT apps behave a lot like desktop apps. Main difference with GWT is that conventional technologies refresh a web page on every navigation click. GWT simply makes an AJAX call to the server and modifies DOM accordingly. This could also be done using JavaScript and DHTML, however GWT introduces a strongly-typed/compiled approach using Java, which makes development and code management a lot easier. It also produces highly-optimized code, which considerably speeds up loading time. In the end, GWT app feels a lot closer to desktop behavior. By adding Google Gears API to this combo, a plugin which allows a web app to work offline, it becomes possible to create web apps that are speedier, consume less resources, and are capable of working 'unplugged'.

This technology is still pretty young compared to other more conventional ones, but is gaining popularity relatively quickly given the advantages that it offers.

Comment by Stephen McMahon on September 12, 2009 at 2:35pm

I first learned about GWT from Dan a while back and I've been pushing it in my company by starting small and demonstrating how we could improve the user experience in some of our web applications. I think that I may have convinced them to allow me to do a major re-write of an application by moving it from the desktop to the web. I originally started out using GXT, but I found out about SmartGWT (http://code.google.com/p/smartgwt/). Are there any other frameworks that you guys have found that you like to use or do you develop your own?

Comment by Daniel Leuck on September 12, 2009 at 11:30am

Great post Kostya! GWT is definitely a breath of fresh air in the world of web development. If any of you are already GWT gurus and would like to work with Kostya on interesting projects, please send your resume to dan@ikayzo.com.