How GWT Works & Our First Design Decision

GWT allows you to write Java code, which then gets compiled down into Javascript suitable to run in any major web browser. For Java programmers, this means using your familiar language to create the client side of a web application. Hooray!

A GWT application does run inside of a web page; it's important not to forget that we aren't actually writing Java. We're writing Javascript that runs in a browser, so not everything is the way we're used to it.

Our first major design decision is how to integrate the GWT application into the web page. Here are the options:

HTML First

In this option, the HTML files control the layout and look and feel of the site, while the GWT application will fill in specific areas in the page with their own information. A web designer would create the page, and leave in blank divs for the GWT application to use.

The advantage of this is that the web designer doesn't have to understand anything about GWT. They just have to give their divs appropriate ids.

Pure GWT

In this approach, the basic HTML file is empty, and the entire user interface is built using GWT. The advantage of this is that you have, basically, only one page in the entire application. It all loads, and after that asynchronous calls are made to fetch data. The GWT code can change the components on the page all it wants.

The disadvantage is that it looks like an application, not a pretty web page. You can take alook at Gmail to see what this would look like.

Another disadvantage is that a pure GWT site won't index well in search engines. This isn't a problem for member-only areas, but is for the public areas of the site.

And The Answer Is?

Ultimately, I think the HTML First option is the way to go. It allows you to leverage talented web designers to create a very nice looking site, and allows the GWT programmers to focus on just the logic of the application and not on how it looks. We can also get pages indexed.

Unfortunately for my students, if they choose that option it means they'll have to learn some HTML. If they've escaped it so far, that isn't such a bad thing in this day and age. But it does mean extra work learning something we won't cover in class.

I'll be using that option for my sample application. I'm not a great web designer (just the opposite, in fact), but I hope to be able to find someone to make it pretty later.