GWT Blog

GWT Support for Mobile App Development

Monday, July 23, 2012

If you’re interested in using GWT to build mobile apps and mobile web apps from a single codebase, then you’ll want to take a good look at mgwt. The following is a guest blog post from Daniel Kurka, the creator of the mgwt library.
Going mobile with mgwt and gwt-phonegap

mgwt is a library for developing mobile apps and mobile websites with GWT using a single codebase. mgwt provides native-looking widgets and effects for most of the popular mobile platforms. It also comes with a ton of other useful features for building mobile apps. We’ve detailed some of them later on in the post.

gwt-phonegap enables GWT apps to use Phonegap. With Phonegap, HTML5 applications can access the same device features that native apps can use via Javascript APIs, such as the camera, file system or contacts.

With mgwt and gwt-phonegap, you can deploy your GWT applications to any app store that Phonegap supports (such as the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store), or let your users access them as a mobile-enhanced web applications. Both projects are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License, and are available from Maven Central.

Some of the key features in mgwt and gwt-phonegap:

mobile widgets that are compatible with UiBinder and the Editor Framework

a DOM API for touch and animation events that corresponds to HTML5 and CSS3, and gesture recognizers built on top these APIs that detect the most common gestures on mobile devices

themes for iPhone, iPad, Android phones, Android tablets, and BlackBerry

auto-generated HTML5 offline manifest to support development of offline applications

in GWT’s development mode, gwt-phonegap emulates the Phonegap API, so that developers can debug and test Phonegap applications from within their IDE

support for GWT RPC in a Phonegap environment

One of the most impressive things about mgwt is how closely the widgets and effects resemble their native counterparts on each specific platform.

For example, this is how some of the widgets look on iOS and Android:

mgwt is built for performance and uses many GWT core concepts to be as efficient as possible. As mobile app developers know, performance and efficiency are critcal.

Both mgwt and gwt-phonegap are built by Daniel Kurka, who is one of the GWT Steering Committee members.

Want to learn more? Check out the mgwt homepage and the blog. There’s also a 90-minute talk on mgwt presented at the Dutch Google Developer Group (GDG), and a post on Daniel’s blog with a more detailed description of mgwt’s features.

Links
mgwt homepage: http://www.m-gwt.com
blog: http://blog.daniel-kurka.de
mgwt talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V0CdhMFiao&feature=plcp
mgwt features: http://blog.daniel-kurka.de/2012/07/mgwt-going-mobile-with-gwt-phonegap.html
Daniel Kurka: http://www.daniel-kurka.de

GWT 2.5 RC is here!

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Today we are excited to announce the GWT 2.5 Release Candidate.

You can skip past all the information and download this release from our main GWT download page.

GWT 2.5 comes with new optimizations that boast a 20% code size reduction and a 39% reduction in initial download size of the Showcase application. GWT 2.5 also includes several new features that improve both usability and functionality:

Preview of Super Dev Mode

We have begun work on a replacement for Development Mode that will support more browsers, because it doesn't require any browser plugins. While it is not yet a full replacement, we expect that many developers will already prefer it. Interested early adopters can learn more by reading Introducing Super Dev Mode.

Introducing Elemental

Elemental is an experimental new library for fast, lightweight, and "to the metal" web programming in GWT. It's intended for developers who are comfortable working with the browser API's that JavaScript programmers use. We think it will be an excellent 'thin' library for both mobile and desktop web applications.

Speed and Optimization Improvements

Integration with the Closure Compiler
To further optimize the Javascript generated by GWT, we have integrated Google’s Closure Compiler as an optional backend for the GWT compiler. Yes, there is now comprehensive function and variable inlining, and a graph-coloring-based variable allocator to squeeze even more performance out of your GWT application!
Code Splitter Improvements

The code splitter now has the ability to automatically partition deferred code that is specified by GWT.runAsync() calls. By detecting code fragments that share common functionality and merging them together into a single fragment, the GWT compiler can reduce the size of the leftover fragment that needs to be download after the initial page load. This greatly reduces the latency of loading the first deferred fragment of a GWT application.

ARIA
We’ve added a new accessibility library that has a full coverage of the W3C ARIA standard. In fact, the library is generated from the standard itself! This library makes it easier to correctly set ARIA roles, states, and properties on DOM elements. For more details, have a look at the updated GWT accessibility documentation.

UiBinder and CellWidget Enhancements
GWT 2.5 adds extensions to UiBinder that allow it to support Cell rendering and event handling. In particular, this design enables UiBinder to generate a UiRenderer implementation to assist with rendering SafeHtml, and dispatching events to methods specified by @UiHandler tags.

We’ve also introduced the IsRenderable/RenderablePanel types. When used by an application instead of HTMLPanel, they can significantly improve rendering time and reduce the latency of complex UiBinder UIs. In the case of Orkut, for example, it improved startup latency by 20% and rendering speed by 300%.

Finally, we’d like to thank the many developers, both inside and outside of Google, that contributed to this release candidate. This release contains over 50 patches written by developers that are not part of the GWT team! We are very grateful for all of your contributions.

-Rajeev Dayal and Bhaskar Janakiraman, on behalf of the GWT Team

Angry Birds Chrome now uses the Web Audio API

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Cross-posted with the Google Code BlogAngry Birds for ChromeWeb Audio APIuse cases

seen or heardPlayNGoogle Web Toolkitgwt-voicesWeb Audio APIFlashHTML5 AudionativeWeb Audio API tutorialthose pigs

Google Plugin for Eclipse (GPE) is Now Open Source

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Today is quite a milestone for the Google Plugin for Eclipse (GPE). Our team is very happy to announce that all of GPE (including GWT Designer) is open source under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) v1.0. GPE is a set of software development tools that enables Java developers to quickly design, build, optimize, and deploy cloud-based applications using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), Speed Tracer, App Engine, and other Google Cloud services. Because of the large ecosystem that has developed around GWT, App Engine, and Google’s Cloud services, and because our primary mission is to help users (as opposed to creating proprietary development tools), it makes a lot of sense for us to open source GPE and make it easier for the community to enhance and extend the tools. According to Red Hat’s Max Andersen, “We have many developers using Google's Eclipse plugin to develop GWT-based applications targeting the JBoss Application Server. With the open sourcing of the plugin we are looking forward to working even more closely with the Google team and the rest of the community on making the developer experience even more productive and an integrated part of Eclipse platform. We are especially interested in seeing the Google Eclipse plugins being able to target multiple runtimes such as the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and Google App Engine in a uniform way, working more seamlessly with standards-based tools and frameworks.” As of today, all of the code is available directly from the new GPE project and GWT Designer project on Google Code. Note that GWT Designer itself is based upon the WindowBuilder open source project at Eclipse.org (contributed by Google last year). We will be adopting the same guidelines for contributing code used by the GWT project. In the months to come we expect to start bringing on more committers, but don't let that stop you from contributing. The project will only grow with the community's input. Submitting bugs via the issue tracker and engaging with other users on the forums will go a long way towards ensuring the overall quality of the product.

GWT and Dart

Thursday, November 10, 2011

the Dart programming languageDart and GWT both share the goal of enabling structured web programming. In fact, many of the same engineers who brought you GWT are working on Dart. We view Dart as an ambitious evolution of GWT’s mission to make web apps better for end users, and we’re optimistic about its potential. As Dart evolves and becomes ready for prime time, we anticipate working closely with the GWT developer community to explore Dart. Meanwhile, rest assured that GWT will continue to be a productive and reliable way to build the most ambitious web apps — and even games like Angry Birds. Key projects within Google rely on GWT every day, and we plan to continue improving (and open-sourcing) GWT based on their real-world needs.

Pictarine: pictures in the cloud

Monday, September 19, 2011

Cross posted from the Google App Engine blog.Pictarine is a photo management web application, launched in 2010, that allows people to easily manage and share all of their photos from Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Twitter and other sites. Pictarine developers Guillaume Martin and Maxime Rafalimanana have contributed the following post discussing their experiences using Google App Engine and Google Web Toolkit.

Building a mashup in the cloud with Google App EngineBuilding a fresh photo experience with Google Web Toolkit Building an universal uploader

MashableLifehacker

Working with Maven and RequestFactory in GWT 2.4

Friday, September 16, 2011

GWT 2.4 introduced changes to both Maven and RequestFactory, and we've recently updated the GWT wiki and sample apps with the latest and greatest:

WorkingWithMaven (with instructions for Eclipse 3.5, 3.6, 3.7)

RequestFactoryInterfaceValidation

RequestFactory now does compile-time validation to ensure that your service implementations match your client-side interfaces. This feature is implemented using an annotation processor which must be configured in Eclipse or in your Maven POM. When configured in Eclipse, you will now see warnings and errors in the IDE anywhere your client- and server-side RF code don't match.In addition, the RequestFactory jars are now in Maven Central. Note that the Maven groupId for RF artifacts differs from the rest of the GWT artifacts since RF can be used in Android clients as well as GWT. If you're using RequestFactory instead of GWT-RPC, you no longer need gwt-servlet. Instead, you can use the much smaller requestfactory-server jar and requestfactory-apt (which contains the RF interface validation tool). You do not need requestfactory-client for GWT projects as the required classes are already included in gwt-user. The requestfactory-client jar is intended for non-GWT (Android) clients using RequestFactory. <dependency> <groupId>com.google.web.bindery</groupId> <artifactId>requestfactory-server</artifactId> <version>2.4.0</version> </dependency>  <dependency> <groupId>com.google.web.bindery</groupId> <artifactId>requestfactory-apt</artifactId> <version>2.4.0</version> </dependency> The mobilewebapp and dynatablerf samples show everything working together and have been tested in Eclipse 3.6 and 3.7.If you also have the Eclipse Subversive plugin installed (see http://www.shareyourwork.org/roller/ralphsjavablog/entry/eclipse_indigo_maven_and_svn), you should be able to try the mobilewebapp sample as easily as

File > Import > Checkout Maven projects from SCM, point to https://google-web-toolkit.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/samples/mobilewebapp

Run as > Web application

Special thanks to Jeff Larsen for the RequestFactory POM sauce that works in Eclipse Indigo!

Web Toolkit Blog