Chapter 1. Introducing GWT
This chapter covers
- The history and purpose of GWT
- The components of GWT
- GWT basics
- Working with the GWT shell and GWT compiler
The man of virtue makes the difficulty to be overcome his first business, and success only a subsequent consideration.
Confucius
Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) development is hard. Not ascending-Everest hard, maybe not even calculating-your-taxes hard, but hard. This is true for a number of reasons: JavaScript can require a lot of specialized knowledge and discipline, browsers have slightly different implementations and feature sets, tooling is still immature, and debugging in multiple environments is problematic. All of these factors add up to developers needing a vast knowledge of browser oddities and tricks to build and manage large Ajax projects.
To help deal with these problems, a number of toolkits and libraries have emerged. Libraries like Dojo, Script.aculo.us, Ext JS, and the Yahoo User Interface Library (YUI) have sought to provide enhanced core features and general ease of use to JavaScript. In addition, projects like Direct Web Remoting (DWR) have sought to simplify communications between the client and the server. Even more advanced techniques, like those used by XML11 and Echo2, create an entire rendering layer in the browser while executing application code on the server side. These are all valid approaches, but the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) represents something different.