Possible GWT Books

Part of the problem with teaching something that's still changing as quickly as GWT and App Engine is finding a suitable text book. GWT is at version 1.6 right now, and the books I've seen haven't caught up yet.

So far, I've received evaluation copies of Pro Web 2.0 Application Development with GWT, and Accelerated GWT. Kudos to Apress for getting those out to me very quickly! I'm still waiting to hear from Manning Publications on a review copy of their GWT In Practice.

Which book I end up using will depend in part on how this sample project goes. So far, I'm very impressed with the topics covered in Pro Web 2.0 Application Development with GWT. The author, Jeff Dwyer, takes you through the development cycle for a full web 2.0 application. Along the way he talks about how he solved those issues that always come up when you start to move away from toy sample applications. In particular, his discussions of real web 2.0 security concerns are excellent.

But, the tool stack Dwyer chose for his project may not match what I'll end up using. I'll give some of the tools he chose a try, but since I'm using App Engine for the server and he didn't, not everything will match. So I'm not sure it'll be a good text for the course, even though I consider it to be an invaluable reference for web 2.0 development issues.

Accelerated GWT looks very nice, although it's more of a general book, and not focused on developing one specific application. It covers GWT 1.4, though, and the version I'll be using will be 1.6 (it's hard to tell what it'll be up to by spring 2010, when the course runs).

Even so, it seems like it would function better as a general text, since it nicely covers server integration but doesn't rely on a particular tool stack.

We'll see what other books I can come up with to review, but I'm not going to wait on picking the text to start development. My free time is pretty limited, so it'll take most of the summer to put this together.

If I only knew what I was going to develop...