Hi,
I have been experimenting with GWT for a few weeks now and am very
impressed. Especially with 2.0 and now that Netbeans plugin is fully
functional. Works like a treat! However, I have yet to pin down
exactly what GWT should be used for. As far as I can tell it is
primarily for building rich internet <b>applications</b> which will be
made available to subscribers through the ubiquitous browser and most
often through secure logon. I can see the power of using GWT in this
way.
For the past few years I have been quick to ridicule anyone who wanted
to build web-apps for use in a browser. Anything more complicated than
the most basic application soon became a complete nightmare to
implement and sometimes actually functionally impossible. I wrote one
such app for a client who wanted the 'user experience' to be as good
as a standard desktop VB/Swing application. It didn't matter how much
I protested, my pay cheque was dependent upon me complying with his
wish. So I hacked together a really nasty bunch of Servlets with a
gazillion 'out.write('<br>...html, html, html </br>')' lines. The
whole thing was really, really grubby and a real pain to maintain.
Now some might say that I could have used JSP/JSF/tags blah blah but
seriously?!! I love Java and all things J2EE except for the God-awful
presentation layer. It is unnatural. It is freakish hell. So GWT comes
along and looks just the ticket! So am I right in saying that GWT
should not be used for mickey-mouse JS? And that it really is intended
for serious hard-core browser-based apps - which may also have a
standard desktop version running off the same server business logic?
One other thing. I have fallen in love with a project called Ape (Ajax
Push Engine) - www.ape-project.org To me, all my dreams will have come
true if I can integrate Ape into a GWT-based web-app. I can already
hear the cash tills ringing as this is the ultimate missing brick in
true browser-based applications. Has anyone managed to get the two
playing nicely together? Wouldn't it be so cool to have a real time
update (pushed) data into a GWT (or ExtJS) grid? That would really
float my boat so I would love to hear if this has been achieved yet..
Thanks for reading and if you can I would welcome answers and comments
Cheers
Hugh
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