Mersoft Corporation Blog

Google Web Toolkit

My first task at Mersoft was to develop an ajax-rich web interface with a Java backend. I was told that it must be tabbed and was shown the existing interface which pretty much was just a file upload. The project was to keep the file upload plus have several tabs containing different types of reports generated from the file upload.

I was originally directed to Tibco’s GI. The GI has it’s own “Interface Builder” used to build the gui. Creating tabs using the builder was easy, but it looked like the only way the interface could talk to a server was through a web service. Also, I didn’t see anything that would allow me to do a file upload. I started looking at the source code, and it appeared difficult to customize and/or expand.

After doing some searching, I came across Google’s Web Toolkit (GWT). This uses Java code to build the interface and gets compiled to html and javascript. This even works with Eclipse. GWT was able to handle file uploading (although due to security issues, this had to be done with a form submit). I have been able to find lots of plugins, plus it has been very easy to expand most plugins and it seems easy to create my own plugin for GWT. Also, although I haven’t done this personally, it looks like it’s easy to integrate with a Javascript library, if the need ever arises. I was also able to integrate it with Struts 2.

I have looked at several other toolkits. Most of them required a lot of Javascript, even with the use of the toolkit. For me (a Java programmer), it is much easier writing code in Java than in Javascript. After reviewing the other frameworks and working with projects that do not use GWT, I highly recommend GWT and look forward to using it on future projects.