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."
Short answer: No. (Score:3, Informative)
In other words, if you want to make sure your site "just works", GWT isn't a good technology to use. If your management team is paying attention, that should pretty much stick a fork in this technology.
Re:When I hear OO ... When I hear Java (Score:3, Informative)
There's plenty of unreadable, unusable OO code out there, as well as plenty of well performing Java.
Re:GWT feels like GUI programming (Score:2, Informative)
From TFA: GWT essentially exploits the browser as a run-time environment for lightweight GUI applications, and the result is much closer to what you might develop with Morfik, OpenLaszlo, or even Flash, than to normal Web applications
It seems more suitable for client development in intranet-type situations, rather than for stuff to go on the web at large. GWT is walled off from the traditional web page, it seems, and the article says there's no way to take values out of widgets to use in a form submission.
It's interesting, the company I'm working for finally caught "browser based applications" fever, and this is another possible platform we could use. Of course since we aren't a Java house, we'll end up using ASP.NET.
Re:Mingling of server and client code is "unusual" (Score:2, Informative)
There are developers who still use VI for Web developments :)
GWT is the heavy favorite to serve as the core for our new webapp.
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Re:Accessibility? (Score:5, Informative)
*Section 508 Standards for Electronic and Information Technology;
SubSection 1194
Article misses the point a bit? (Score:5, Informative)
Also, just because GWT provides some server-side machinery doesn't mean you have to use it. GWT will happily make asynchronous calls to any old URL, so you can write your backend in PHP or Perl or C or whatever you like. Personally, I've been playing with GWT using PHP/SQLite as my backend (following Juan Hurtado's great tutorial [googlepages.com]). It works great, and since I'm already comfortable with Java, PHP and SQL, it doesn't require a steep learning curve to create very nice web apps.
That said, I will certainly be taking a deeper look at TFA later and perhaps following its example to learn how to use the Java server-side machinery. Could be interesting.
Re:Accessibility? (Score:2, Informative)
So, basically your script navigation has to provide text labels or alt tags, which they nearly always do.
Re:GWT vs. Echo2 (Score:3, Informative)
Echo 2.x seems to have now added support for ajax.. a demo is available here: http://demo.nextapp.com/Demo/app [nextapp.com]