About this Book
Welcome to GWT in Practice. This book is intended to serve as a practical field guide for developers working with the Google Web Toolkit. While it includes some introductory information, it is not a complete introduction to all the classes and libraries included with GWT. It is, however, a guide to working around common issues developers encounter when building GWT applications, and to working with other Java EE technologies.
When getting started with GWT, there are a lot of things that will seem alien to traditional web developers in the Java world. This begins with GWT’s tooling—a specialized version of Tomcat for debugging and testing your Ajax applications—and continues into the design approach—an expression of the Model View Controller (MVC) pattern more akin to desktop application development than the web frameworks you may be familiar with. Hopefully this book will smooth the glide path for you as you move into development with GWT.
GWT in Practice also looks at working with technologies you may be familiar with, but that have different usage patterns in the GWT world. These include using the Java Persistence API with Hibernate or TopLink, working with build tools, testing, and continuous integration. These are at the core of modern enterprise application development but can be problematic for new GWT developers. We’ll give you what you need to integrate GWT applications into your enterprise development environment.