Gwt In Action

GWT in Action

GWT in Action
EASY AJAX WITH THE GOOGLE WEB TOOLKIT
ROBERT HANSON ADAM TACY

MANNING
Greenwich (74° w. long.)

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Copyeditor: Tiffany Taylor Typesetters: Gordan Salinovic Cover designer: Leslie Haimes

ISBN 1-933988-23-1 Printed in the United States of America 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 – MAL – 13 12 11 10 09 08 07

To my son, David Thank you for letting me shorten playtime so many times, so that Daddycould work on his book. —RH

To my parents Everything I have achieved is because of something you did for me. Thank you. —AT

brief contents
PART 1 GETTING STARTED .......................................................1
1 2 3
■ ■ ■

Introducing GWT

3 38 64

Creating the default application

Advancing to your own application

PART 2

BUILDING USER INTERFACES.....................................107
4 5 6 7 8 9
■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

Working with widgets Working with panels Handling events 192

109 157 246 277 317

Creating composite widgets Building JSNI components Modularizing an application

PART 3

ADVANCED TECHNIQUES ...........................................345
10 11 12
■ ■ ■

Communicating with GWT-RPC Classic Ajax and HTML forms

347 375 409Examining client-side RPC architecture

vii

viii

BRIEF CONTENTS

13 14 15

■ ■ ■

Achieving interoperability with JSON 442 Automatically generating new code 471 494 Changing applications based on GWT properties

PART 4

COMPLETING THE UNDERSTANDING ..........................525
16 17
■ ■

Testing and deploying GWT applications Peeking into how GWT works 555

527

contentspreface xix acknowledgments xxi about this book xxiii about the title xxx about the cover illustration xxxi

PART 1 GETTING STARTED ............................................1

1

Introducing GWT 3
1.1 A walk through GWT 5
Explaining GWT's Java-to-JavaScript compiler 6 ■ Using JSNI to execute JavaScript from Java 8 ■ Accessing the JRE emulation library 10 ■ Understanding GWT's widget andpanel library 12 ■ Examining GWT’s internationalization and configuration tools 14 ■ Calling remote procedures with GWT 16 ■ Investigating GWT’s XML parser 20 ■ Managing the browser history 21 ■ Introducing GWT’s JUnit integration 22

1.2

GWT vs. other solutions

23

GWT vs. Swing 25 ■ GWT vs. Echo2 26 ■ GWT vs. JavaServer Faces 27 ■ GWT vs. Ruby on Rails 29

ix

x

CONTENTS

1.3Building your first GWT application

30
30

Building and running an example application Building Tic-Tac-Toe with GWT 32

1.4

Summary

37

2

Creating the default application 38
2.1 2.2 The GWT application development lifecycle Stage 1: Creating a GWT application 44 39

Creating the project 47 ■ Creating an application 50 Setting up internationalization 54 ■ Implementing...