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Is the Google Web Toolkit Right For You?
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."
I, for one, welcome our weather-reporting overlords.
+5, Truth
I think that's how ASP.NET components have worked for years too. So, I wouldn't say that it's unusual unless you're coming from a completely "my text editor is my development environment" world.
Does it have a "I'm feeling lucky" feature, where it will deploy your project for the first time without bugs?
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.
You haven't seen bad OO code? (maybe YOU'RE the bastard who writes it) You don't know how to write good non-OO code? It exists.
There is an OO equivalent to spaghetti code, and it's fearsome.
I had to stop after the third line... "Level: Advanced"
I think that's how ASP.NET components have worked for years too.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
When I hear someone say what you said I think... "another hack who's never programmed anything, never will, but read some shit on slashdot about it and now believes he's an expert"
There's plenty of unreadable, unusable OO code out there, as well as plenty of well performing Java.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
There's been several JS code generators recently. Apart from GWT there's also haXe which is more ambitious. haXe can also be used on the Server Side and includes some facilities for Dynamic programming (whereas Java is strongly typed 100% of the time).
Also, what's the state of the art in screen readers? Do they have sufficient JavaScript support? (*)
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.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
That's because that's what it is.
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.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
We've already got an MVC LAMP architecture here at work and I have limited Javascript development until the framework was further along. But now the designers are getting edgy because I won't let them incorporate Javascript.
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.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
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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When I hear "code generator", I think compiler.
Hmm, all the examples in the article look pretty much the same than they were written in JavaScript, but in a more complex way. Why not actually learn the trade. Its easier to fix problems if you're working with the actual code that runs in the browser, not the "meta code".
I would never, ever, ever even _think_ of trying to write an Ajax application. I hate javascript way too much for that, and the whole asynchronous web-page dynamicness scares the shit out of me. However, I can stand writing GUI code in Java, and I already have some knowledge of how it works. GWT enables me to write super-cool Ajax websites without worrying a bit about javascript. I think this is the true power of GWT: it enables _application_ developers (rather than web developers) to write nice web applications without learning a whole new skillset. This is a win for developers because we can do cool things without learning a whole new trade, and it's a win for consumers because web apps can be written by skilled application developers instead of photoshop gurus.
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). 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.
This seems like a useful article. At work we were just discussing the possibilities of using the GWT. Currently we use NextApp's Echo1 and are also pondering upgrading to Echo2. The demo app for Echo2 is actually mighty impressive; I'd say moreso than GWT's. Though I wonder how much of it is just more time spent on fancy graphics as opposed to a better quality framework.
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.) 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.
The two things I like about the Yahoo! UI toolkit are that:
- 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
"Smart is sexy." -- D. Scully ("War of the Coprophages")
Now I understand why computer science geeks don't "couple". They have a whole different meaning of the word from the rest of the world ;)
Uses java byte code instead of source so it's more stable. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-317158218 7051229467
Did you say "Google Web Rootkit"?
You can defy gravity... for a short time