GWT in Action

One Minute Bottom Line

Hanson and Tacy have created a very readable and detailed introduction to the Google Web Toolkit. The thoroughness with which they designed examples to illustrate every concept dealt with in the book and the scope of the topics addressed in it makes GWT in Action a valuable addition to any Web developer library. Even if you are not planning to use this technology in your daily professional activities it is still a worthwhile endeavor to appreciate the ingenuity and understand the thinking of the Google team coming out with a product that makes it possible for the developers with server-side and desktop Java skills to build sophisticated Web applications.

Review

Chapter 1 Introducing GWT. This chapter serves as a map for the entire book. Here the authors list all the technologies discussed in the rest of the book and dedicate a section to explaining how each technology (such as core GWT, its compiler, widgets, JRE emulation library, GWT-RPC, XML parser, to name a few) fits in the overall picture and how it is used. Next, the introductory chapter briefly raises us from the world of GWT and compares the toolkit with such competing (and complimentary) technologies as Swing, Echo2, JavaServer Faces and Ruby on Rails. Such a discussion is a good idea but here it is too short in my view to assist a reader in deciding which technology is more appropriate for his application. The introductory chapter concludes with the a hands-on exercise at the end of which a functional Tic-Tac-Toe game with is created by utilizing the combination of generated and hand-written code using such concepts as panels, buttons and event handlers.