Preface

At the Sun JavaOne conference in 2006, where GWT was first showcased, the lights immediately went on. I was in attendance, and I instantly understood, as did many others, what GWT creators Bruce Johnson and Joel Webber were showing the world. GWT was something different. It was not just another web framework at a Java conference but a new approach. An approach that embraced the treatment of JavaScript in the browser as the “assembly language” of the web, as Arno Puder of the XML11 project once put it, and that did so by starting from Java, in order to iron out some of the terrain of the browser landscape.

I was excited about leveraging this new technology in the real world, and I brought it back to the company I worked for, where my longtime friend Charlie Collins also worked. There, in Atlanta, Georgia, where the GWT team is also based, we started cranking away on several GWT applications, some tools to help support our development (such as GWT-Maven), and a framework approach to using GWT. Along the way, we got involved in the GWT community on the project-issue tracker and discussion boards, we pondered GWT at JUG meetings, and we discussed some of the finer points with the GWT team on a few special occasions.