Chaotic Java

I’ve been working with GWT (Google’s Web Toolkit) a bit recently, and I must first say it’s an amazing tool. It does have some downfalls, like requiring you to use J2SE 1.4 syntax, so no enum or generics when developing with GWT.. That said, there’s nothing stopping you from using the Java SE 5 or 6 framework, so concurrency and all the other goodies are still there (to be used on the server side, obviously).

And that’s just unfortunate, because I really got used to using enums! Still, not having the syntax is not going to stop me. After all, enums in Java are eventually translated into classes, so I can just write my own GWT-compatible Enum-class. Continue reading »

Regarding my previous rant, I am still waiting for GWT to be released on the Mac (with hosted mode, that is), and until that happens I am toying around with it in very slow pace. However, one issue is semi-resolved for me as I read this article from Nub Games. Apparently, there’s an easy way to implement drag and drop in GWT, using mostly out-of-the-box tools provided by the framework and the rest is standard code that can be generified to an almost invisible level.

I hope that soon some examples on my part would be available, but for now I can’t use the Windows computer for GWT toying, and as for the Mac.. We’ll have to wait for Google to make their move. Regarding that, Scott Blum of Google asked if anyone who’s a Safari ninja (in code, not usage) could send him an email so that this situation could be fixed.

In response to the excitement of yesterday, and to continue that post, I will now count a few things I personally woud like to see happening in GWT, and its IntelliJ integration.

• UI Editor Just as the world realised that editing forms should not be done by hand-writing the code to create them, so did the world realise the same about web pages. Composite components and EntryPoint can be edited through a UI editor, binding event handlers and placing them on different panels, just like any UI editor should be.
• Mac Support I know it’s just in its early beta stages, but I still got very disappointed that there was no Mac support for hosted mode, which basically means there’s no debugging available or serious IDE integration. This one is actually tracked on their issue tracker.
• Draggables and Drop-Boxes The importance of drag and drop features for today’s and tomorrow’s portals and e-commerce solutions are great, and they’re needed. Google already presented a draggable window with the DialogBox control and since it’s open sourced, it’s possible to figure out how to create other draggable controls. However, API support is needed as it would save a lot of time and trouble for those of us who do not want to meddle with backward engineering Google’s code.

GWT allows you to run your web application in an environment called hosted mode, which allows you to debug your application using your IDE in sane Java code, running on a JVM. The advantage of this is that there is no longer a need to debug JavaScript application using weird methods: if you trust the GWT compiler, and it seems like you can, you should be able to trust that the result would work well if your logic is tested and debugged out while still in Java form. Speaking of testing your code, there seems to be support for unit testing using JUnit, but I haven’t tried it out yet.