Hi all, In my company, we have been working with GWT for almost a year, developing a ridesharing application (http://www.bigoo.com.br). I really can't overstate how much we enjoy developing in java, using familiar tools, debugging in hosted mode, and so on. But one thing that has really bothered us for a long time is the dificulty of integrating the work of developers (who write the code that eventually outputs the HTML) with the work of designers (who write CSS).
Eventually we came up with a method where the designer gave the devs an HTML fragment that worked as a 'contract' between their codes. The devs had to write the GWT code that instantiated the widgets and set ids and styles according to the spec. It worked, we did the job, but there were lots of problems on the way: - every little change to the 'contract' (new id, new classes) had to be implemented by the developer. Therefore, there was a significant delay between the designer's writing of the css and it being reflected on the system. - the designer felt rather demotivated by not having control over generation of the UI. Well, I guess some of these problems have already been mentioned here. I won't dwell on it anymore. Recently we implemented a small tool to help us overcome this problem. In short, the designer writes the specs in an extended subset of HTML, outside of the java code, in a properties file. This file is processed by a generator we wrote that outputs the java code needed to instantiate the gwt widgets corresponding to that spec. In the GWT code we can retrieve each subnode of the tree (or 'subwidget') by the id, and add to it the appropriate handlers, or set any other property. We have automated the instantiation of the widgets, their addition the the corresponding parents, the setting of a few properties such as ids, classes, titles, value and enabled. It has allowed us to reimplement complete pages, with all the interaction we had before, significantly speeding up the development process, reducing the size of the code, making it more readable, and increasing developer and designer satisfaction. I'd like to ask the community if anyone is interested on such a tool. We are planning on opening up this code, but it still needs some work. If it's of anyone's interest we would gladly open it. Cheers, Davi Pires -- eco-blog: http://tarjaverde.wordpress.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Web Toolkit" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-web-toolkit?hl=en.
