Chapter 4. Core Application Structure
This chapter covers
- Creating composite view components
- Data binding for the model and view
- The relationship of the controller to the RPC service layer
- Using JPA in the model
- Completing a front-to-back GWT application, client, and server
You must unlearn what you have learned.
Yoda (The Empire Strikes Back)
You have been building web applications for years now. The flaws in the process are obvious, but if you are like us, coping with these flaws has become second nature. You know GWT provides a whole new metaphor for web development, and chapter 2’s calculator example demonstrated that GWT development is much more like traditional desktop application development. Now you can hit rewind on your experiences and knowledge and look at web development in a new way. In this second part of the book, we will go beyond the introductory material you saw in the previous chapters, and look at more goal-oriented GWT techniques.
When working with GWT, you are, of course, no longer building navigation and pages in the way you did before. Even more module-centric web frameworks like JSF are still essentially page-based, with the model, view, and controller layers executing within the application server. Now you need to look at your application as having a series of widgets making up the view, a controller that orchestrates actions, and a smart model layer.