There was a lot of buzz at JavaOne regarding the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). Basically, GWT allows a developer to write a AJAX powered web application in Java!! The Java code gets ‘compiled’ to a set of plain old text files containing your JavaScript code. For example, the GWT will translate your rollover actions written in Java to JavaScript functions. This confused me for a second so I’ll stress again that you compile your web application written in Java to plain old JavaScript and HTML that can run in any browser.
What this means is that if you are a Java developer you don’t have to learn JavaScript and all the idiosyncrasies of every browser to develop a stable and reliable AJAX web application.
To get started download the GWT from Google, configure it with Eclipse, and create a new web application.
I created and imported into Eclipse a project called WebApp. In my Package Explorer under webapp > src > com.juixe.gwt I have a public directory that contains my WebApp.html. This file was created by the applicationCreator batch file provided with the GWT. For the purpose of this walk through I modified my WebApp.html as follows:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>HTML for WebApp</TITLE>
<!-- You need this to reference your GWT module -->
<META name='gwt:module' content='com.juixe.gwt.WebApp'>
<SCRIPT language="javascript" src="gwt.js">
</SCRIPT>
<STYLE>
</STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<H1>My WebApp</H1>
Any text or HTML goes here.
<DIV id="changeOnRollOver"></DIV>
</BODY>
</HTML>
The HTML is simple to describe itself. I have a body that can contain any HTML. I can use CSS style sheets. The only tag that seems out of place it he meta tag.
