Google Web toolkit has been around for quite sometime now. If you want to build a rich internet application these days it will involve extensive JavaScript work. JavaScript is still not everybody’s forte.
An application that we built a year before had a screen where we had to send around 100 AJAX requests. Each request fetched JSON data, and we assembled the data simultaneously and displayed it in charts. The application was developed in .NET, jQuery and HighCharts. It was one hell of an implementation though we had learnt a lot from the experience.
Looking back, we feel using GWT would have solved the problem faster and the solution would have been better as well. All we had to do was write code in Java using GWT API and let the GWT compiler generate highly optimized JavaScript code that can be readily deployed in the server.
A lot of developers out there are still not gungho about this framework for some reason or the other. Most of them still feel awkward to the fact that you have to write code in one language while the tool takes care of generating code in another. They feel they are better off implementing these rich applications using modern day frameworks like Ext JS 4.
Sencha provides the Ext JS 4 facility to GWT in the form of GXT. Most of the Ext JS 4 components are available to GWT applications now.
A recent consulting work on GXT 3 made me realize the hard time developers had while working with GXT3. Sencha provides an explorer application that showcases GXT3 components. You can play with them, view the code and use them. The examples are really good but it seems to be an uphill task tweaking them and use them in our projects. If you haven’t worked with Java Swing or Ext JS 4 GXT 3 may frustrate you a lot.
One of the guys floated an idea where you can have stripped down versions of these examples(not all of them) and host them in my GitHub site which seems to be a really nice idea. So I have decided to create simple projects on GXT 3 on each topic and share them. Let’s crack some GXT3 code this month.