Google Web Toolkit Development

The Google Web Toolkit is an application development platform composed of a Java class library, AJAX-style UI components called widgets, an RPC-based request/response communication framework, and an integrated debugging environment. GWT provides a subset of the java.lang and java.util packages, along with a Java API that facilitates component-based GUI development, which can be compiled to HTML and JavaScript for deployment to a browser. GWT emphasizes reusable, efficient solutions to recurring Ajax challenges, namely asynchronous remote procedure calls, history management, bookmarking, Internationalization and cross-browser portability.

Developers can spend 90% of their time working around browser quirks. In addition, building, reusing, and maintaining large JavaScript code bases and AJAX components can be difficult and fragile. Google Web Toolkit (GWT), especially when combined with the Google Plugin for Eclipse, eases this burden by allowing developers to quickly build and maintain complex yet high performance JavaScript front-end applications in the Java programming language.

With Google Web Toolkit (GWT), you write your AJAX front-end in the Java programming language which GWT then cross-compiles into optimized JavaScript that automatically works across all major browsers. During development, you can iterate quickly in the same "edit - refresh - view" cycle you're accustomed to with JavaScript, with the added benefit of being able to debug and step through your Java code line by line. When you're ready to deploy, GWT compiles your Java source code into optimized, standalone JavaScript files.

Features:

• Dynamic and reusable UI components: programmers can use pre-designed classes to implement otherwise time-consuming dynamic behaviors, such as drag-and-drop or sophisticated visual tree structures.
• Simple RPC mechanism
• Browser history management
• Support for full-featured Java debugging
• GWT handles all cross-browser issues for the developer
• Easy internationalization
• The developers can mix handwritten JavaScript in the Java source code using the JavaScript Native Interface (JSNI).
• Support for using Google APIs in GWT applications
• Open-source
• The developers can design and develop their application in a pure object-oriented fashion, since they're using Java (instead of JavaScript). Common JavaScript errors, such as typos and type mismatches, are caught at compile time.
• The JavaScript that the GWT compiler generates can be tailored to be easy to understand and smaller to download.
• A number of libraries are available for GWT, by Google and third parties.