Chaotic Java

Know the feeling when you’re just about to release code to the public’s eye, and all you need to do is write that pesky build file? Even as I write it I feel it’s an understatement: the task of creating an ant build file can take a few good days out of anyone’s life, and even with copying the last project’s build file and changing a few parameters you can’t really minimise it to less than half a day’s work. 

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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.

Okay, it’s still not time to stop holding your breath as I’m not fully back yet. My personal issues are (as long as they are… sigh) close to finish, and I can finally say that a lot of those issues are sorted out already - For example, I have a computer now!

However, I’ve been playing around with GWT, the Google Web Toolkit, and been really impressed with it. I’ve seen a couple major points using it that I really enjoyed, and I will bring them up here. Obviously this is not a full list, I’ve barely played with it enough to say that I know half of the stuff one is able to do with GWT, but I have some of my own first-hand perspectives already.

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