Google Web Toolkit News - onGWT.com

Claude Coulombe

After some exploration, we decided to go with GWT (Google Web Toolkit) for our OpenSyllabus project in Montréal. A main argument was that our team is essentially composed of Java developers with little knowledge of JavaScript.

GWT - The right tool for Java men!

  Kevin Whinnery

In the world of Rich Internet Applications, there is no shortage of technology choices to compose a user interface. But what tools will give us the best bang for our buck? Here is a look at some heavy hitters and newcomers in the RIA market, including: HTML & AJAX, Rails and Grails, Flex, Silverlight, Curl, GWT, OpenLaszlo, and Appcelerator.

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But before abandoning the browser, we still have options.  A number of emerging frameworks seek to tame the browser and make it a suitable platform for a rich client application.  The biggest fish in this pond is currently Google Web Toolkit (or GWT), which allows developers to write UI code in Java and have it transformed to JavaScript that will run in the browser.  All this with all the development tools and skill sets that exist out in the marketplace today surrounding Java. Sounds great doesn't it?

It sure did to me, until I started to actually write a UI in straight up procedural Java.  I was shocked at the volume of code I had to write to assemble even the most basic UI.  Also, trying to read a collection of Java classes and visualize the structure of the UI was, for me, not an easy task. On top of that, it was unclear to me how a design team would effectively collaborate with a development team, especially when they are speaking different programming languages (Java versus HTML/CSS).  The lack of any kind of markup language to accompany Java in GWT hurts it badly - and the alpha-stage markup language extensions that I see coming out seem all too far away.

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Which RIA Tools Give Us the Best Bang For Our Buck?

openlandscape

It probably would be a good idea if the GWT compiler reported any long types as warnings. Theres no point having a long that doesn’t really work. It just opens the opportunity for problems like this one.

Good idea.

Google Web Toolkit’s (GWT) Fake Long

Reinier Zwitserloot :

IE is buggy. __pendingSrc is a GWT-specific workaround. Specifically, if you create 10 image objects, all pointing to the same image, the proper behaviour for the browser is to download this image ONCE.

GWT Work arround

Image source : istockphoto.com

Kikhil Kothari :

“JavaScript is the assembly language of the Web”. Not only is JavaScript ubiquitous, ... it is an amazingly flexible language that allows one to model multiple type systems and programming styles ... script provides a wealth of building blocks, or high-level instructions, that are well suited to be consumed by a higher-level compiler.

I borrowed the quote from Danny Thorpe's presentation titled "Paradoxes in Web Development" from the Lang.NET '06 conference. I am sure Bruce Johnson and the folks on GWT share similar thoughts.

Nikhil Kothari is an architect on the Web/ASP.NET team at Microsoft, and is primarily responsible for the server controls framework, Atlas (Ajax Framework) framework, and Script# (wikipedia).

Ajax Futures and JavaScript as a Universal Runtime

I think the concept of GWT is pretty cool. I mean, aesthetically the idea of compiling Java to JavaScript so that it runs in a web browser is awful, but I understand the attraction of being able to use the same language on both server and client. Whatever developer at Google designed the API for GWT though does not deserve whatever ludicrous amount of money they are probably making from their stock options. It is grossly inelegant in many respects, definitely not worthy of a seasoned Java developer.

So all in all, GWT has made some nice improvements and added some new features. They have not addressed the things that are their most blaring weaknesses (IMO), but then again those are probably the hardest things to address. I was surprised though. From my last big write up, I got a lot of feedback from people talking about how these exact issues were being addressed, i.e. that the work was already in progress. Was that really the case?

So no I’m not going to proliferate GWT as a technology and Google can stay out of my DOM.

I recently got into a debate with a friend of mine about which is better for developing web applications - Google's Web Toolkit (GWT) or Ruby on Rails. He argued for GWT, I for Rails. Neither one of us convinced the other, although we both got each other to watch the frameworks' respective screencasts (GWT, Rails).