Is the Google Web Toolkit Right For You? 163
An anonymous reader writes "The recently released Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a comprehensive set of APIs and tools that lets you create dynamic Web applications almost entirely in Java code. However, GWT is something of an all-or-nothing approach, targeted at a relatively small niche in Web application development market. This article shows you what GWT can do and will help you decide if it's the best tool to use for your web development."
Re:Mingling of server and client code is "unusual" (Score:3, Interesting)
Not to mention EchoPoint.
It's a good idea, but the devil is in the details.
App developers are overwhelmed with details they have to manage. And we all know that the essence of good design is not having to worry about details until the appropriate time. The flip side is when you do focus on some other details you'd been ignoring up to this point, you don't want to have to worry about details you've already taken care of.
So, the idea is that programmers should be able to program with your framework without worrying that they are doing something web based. That's good. But the flip side of that is that designers should be able to design without worrying about the fact the programmers are using your framework.
The problem with past attempts at this paradigm fall short of ideal because they enforce non-standard or proprietary ways of doing things. They may be good enough, but they could be improved on.
Re:When I hear OO ... When I hear Java (Score:2, Interesting)
Great for college research (took multiple classes on it)... but annoying in the real world
haxe (Score:3, Interesting)
Accessibility? (Score:5, Interesting)
If not, using GWT for a corporate web site is just a lawsuit waiting to happen.
(*) This is not an idle question, I'm sincerely interested in real answers and pointers to software.
YAHOO UI Toolkit (Score:5, Interesting)
My issue was that I wanted a unified javascript library so we didn't have redundant code snippets all over the place and some way to standardize the development. So after a little searching, I found the Yahoo UI toolkit that is still in beta. It's a unified javascript library released under a BSD license that has been tested in multiple browsers.
No I have a unified library, tested in multiple browsers and standardized that all I have to do is drop into a directory and hook into the framework.
I know this is probably unrelated but since we were talking about toolkits, I thought this would be handy to mention this as well since it saved us a month of work.
Re:Short answer: No. (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course, i depends on the application. There are cases (most cases?) when Javascript really does nothing but add "flare" to a site which would otherwise work fine without JS. But then there are some apps which actually leverage JS to work around the significant limitations of HTML/HTTP. The latter is becoming more and more common.
-matthew
Google Map's GWT API 1.1.5 (Score:1, Interesting)
GWT vs. Echo2 (Score:3, Interesting)
Why GWT Isn't A Good Framework (Score:4, Interesting)
As a disclaimer, I'm a huge fan of Ruby on Rails, and not at all a fan of Java.
The problem with the GWT and other framworks like it as it ignores the reality that browsers today suck. IE's rendering engine is suckier than Monica Lewinsky holding a Dyson at the event horizon of a black hole. Firefox doesn't quite yet pass Acid2, but is as close to a reference platform as one can get. Safari shows promise, but it has a weak JavaScript environment that doesn't support things like ContentEditable. The whole problem is that the GWT assumes a much more stable platform than actually exists.
The real challenge for web application developers is that there are no frameworks (that I know of) that provide for things like fully semantic code, graceful degradation of capabilities, and full separation of content, behavior, and presentation. (For why that separation is important A List Apart has a great article on the subject [alistapart.com].) Not even Ruby on Rails gets this right by default.
GWT tries too hard to abstract the actual code that user agents see from the code the programmers create - and that level of abstraction just doesn't work yet. Just like trying to translate a passage in French to English and Japanese with a machine translator, the GWT tries to take Java code and translate it into a mish-mash of XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript - and the results are as mangled as one would expect.
Until someone comes along with a framework that creates clean, semantic code with full separation of behavior, presentation, and content, web application developers have to be mindful of their code and do a lot by hand. Frameworks can save time, but they also cause a trade-off in terms of code quality and compatibilty. The GWT goes too far in that balance IMHO, and isn't something I'd use to develop public applications. Like ASP.NET, it's too reliant on abstracting XHTML/CSS/JavaScript from what the programmers deal with, and that always leads to bloated masses of code that frustrate users and hog bandwidth.
Why I like YUI (Score:5, Interesting)
- it is a la carte
- it represents pretty advanced, human-readable Javascript, which has allowed me to learn advanced Javascript techniques
The first, a la carte, means that the entire web application does not need to be dedicated to YUI. Recently I incorporated a YUI DHTML window (Panel, in YUI-speak) into an existing ASP.NET application. It required only a few lines of Javascript and some HTML. Ditto for another application (JSF, this time), where I added an AJAX data lookup to dynamically populate sample values in a dropdown list. I love the DOM and Event libraries: they really clean up the cruddy job of adding small DHTML things to a website, regardless of how it's put together.
The second, that YUI is a learning experience, is also very important to me. I've come late to the DHTML game, and most books and tutorials on Javascript deal with the basics, and stuff like OO programming is either glossed over or omitted entirely. However, Javascript is a language that is suited to OO programming in a unique way, IMHO. By studing how the YUI toolkit works and seeing what Javascript is capable of, it has opened the doors for new ways of tackling problems and reducing the number of lines of JS code I write.
HBH
XML11 looks more promising (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:YAHOO UI Toolkit (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why not learn the tools instead (Score:1, Interesting)
Java developer - Evian and arugula salad with roquefort dressing
Fortran developer - coffee and ham sandwich on Wonder Bread
XML developer - cyanide