Part 2. Next steps

Where part 1 gives you the basics of GWT and enough knowledge to play around and gain understanding of GWT applications and their lifecycle, part 2 takes the next step, diving into the details of typical functionalities you’d use in real-world applications.

We cover client-side aspects such as creating new widgets, the Editor framework, data presentation widgets, as well as efficiency aspects such as using client bundles and how to make your application as widely available as possible using internationalization, localization, and accessibility. Most importantly, we emphasize declarative UI development with UiBinder, giving you that long-needed separation of functionality, UI layout, and styling.

This part also covers a plethora of tools for communicating with the server. These include the general-purpose GWT-RPC, the model-focused RequestFac-tory, the Ajax-style RequestBuilder, and HtmlForm.

In addition, we look at the JavaScript Native Interface aspect of GWT, which we recommend you use in limited places to interface directly to JavaScript. The section looks first at why not to use this approach and then identifies four areas where it makes sense to use it and how to do so.