GWT. Beginners

Good day, ladies and gentlemen,

This article is intended primarily for beginners and is unlikely to bring any benefit to people experienced. But it would be nice if people with experience would bring a couple of useful links in the comments.
So, I advise you to start with a demo . Then you can imagine what the GWT can do and what widgets are available right out of the box. GWT is certainly a very strong Framework, but it’s almost the main problem is that these widgets are not that many. But this does not matter, because There are many different libraries that solve this problem. A special flourishing came at the time 2-3 years ago, when a lot of things in the GWT simply did not exist and there were no obvious favorites among third-party libraries either. Now the situation has changed quite a bit. Therefore, if you need some kind of advanced widget, then I advise you to pay attention to SmartGWT and Ext-GWT.


SmartGWT has a whole bunch of widgets for all occasions. See for yourself . Pay attention to the tables, what more could you ask for? If you still have something missing, you can finish the widget. The library has a very lively forum , if you have a problem, look there. I found the answers to all my questions. You will not find, ask yourself, usually respond very quickly. The library even has its own IDE, although I did not use it. The fact that the library is very popular is also indicated by the fact that the WindowBuilder plugin for Eclipse has the ability to click the GUI from the SmartGWT widgets. The library has a big, in my opinion, flaw: you write a small program with a single table and the size of this program will be immediately under 2 megabytes. Those. Of course, it’s possible to write a site on SmartGWT, but who will wait for it to load? That is why I wrote this site on "pure" GWT. But for different webmord for data banks and services, which are used mainly by LAN, this library is the first candidate for consideration.
If for some reason SmartGWT did not suit you, pay attention to GWT-Ext and GXT . I didn’t work with them, so I can’t say anything, but it doesn’t look bad.
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If you decide to get away with a “clean” GWT, I recommend that you look at this . Also look at these interesting demos . When I saw it, I was just thrilled, it's jQuery for GWT! Now you can make very nice animation effects with just a couple of lines.

Well, at the end of a few points that are useful to know.

The server does not necessarily have to turn Java. There can be almost anything, including PHP. Or maybe nothing at all, if the page does not "talk" server. Here is a look: one , two . I did this thing for E-Learning. Pages are completely static, in the sense that after loading the server they do not need.

From GWT, you can call functions written in pure JavaScripte. This is done elementary, write that the function is native and write JavaScript there. Here it is explained in great detail.

This means that you can use any purely JavaScript library in your GWT project (here I’m not really sure if that’s correct). If you want to pull out the value of any variable from JavaScripta, look towards the Dictionary class.

Alternatively, you can write logic on GWT, and then call it in JavaScripte. It describes how it is done.

Somehow I even found a small library on the net that automates this process.
Virtually every widget has a static wrap () method. For example, if you have a div on a static page and you want to dynamically change its contents, then you just write:

Label label = Label.wrap(DOM.getElementById("A")); label.setText("new Text"); 

where "A" is your div id. Simple, isn't it?

Not all JAV classes have their analogues in GWT. For example, the Thread class cannot be used, which is understandable, since in JavaScripte, multithreading in this sense is not implemented (yet).

Your additions to interesting libraries and features are welcome!