Chapter 1. GWT
This chapter covers
- Understanding GWT’s place in the world
- Introducing some of GWT’s more notable features
- Preparing your development environment
This book is about empowerment. If you’re like 99% of us, you’re sinking in the relentless waves of new tooling in what has become a vast ocean of web development. What you seek is a way to escape the churning waters and land on solid ground.
As the cover says, this is a book about the Google Web Toolkit, pronounced “gwit” by the cool kids at Google, and although GWT might not put you on the perfect tropical island it will get you out of the water and give you a dry place to rest your head for awhile.
But what is GWT? GWT isn’t a “way,” or a framework, or a language. It’s a toolkit. It’s a set of tools that provide the means to easily write sophisticated and reliable Ajax applications using Java. It’s not meant to take advantage of the Java runtime, but instead it makes use of the Java language and existing Java tooling.