March 2012
Intermediate to advanced
82 pages
2h 4m
English
Content preview from Building Mobile Applications with JavaBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 2. Getting Started with GWT
What Is GWT?
Before we get into building mobile apps let’s get to know GWT. GWT, or the Google Web Toolkit, is a set of tools, libraries and plugins. GWT was first released as an open source project by Google in 2006. They built it as a stable platform for their own web based applications that had to run across 100% of browsers, even the old broken ones.
At its core, GWT is a special compiler that can transform Java to JavaScript, along with a minimal runtime. It lets you write mostly standard Java code, then compile it to JavaScript for running in a web browser or other HTML environment. Once compiled there is no Java code left. The generated code runs entirely in the user’s web browser as JavaScript, no applets required. GWT has its own runtime consisting of a minimal set of standard Java APIs like List and String. These are implemented in JavaScript so that your code can call them even when converted. You can see the full list of emulated Java APIs at http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/doc/latest/RefJreEmulation.html.
GWT isn’t just a compiler though. It is also a set of cleverly designed compile steps and runtime libraries that handle browser differences. The compiler can generate different output for each browser, ensuring that the code runs properly no matter what browser the user has, even IE6! The compiler knows how to optimize object references, take advantage of JavaScript language tricks, and reduce memory usage. Much like a traditional ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.