GWT in Practice

Chapter 1. Introducing GWT

This chapter covers

• The history and purpose of GWT
• The components of GWT
• GWT basics
• Working with the GWT shell and GWT compiler

The man of virtue makes the difficulty to be overcome his first business, and success only a subsequent consideration.

Confucius

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) development is hard. Not ascending-Everest hard, maybe not even calculating-your-taxes hard, but hard. This is true for a number of reasons: JavaScript can require a lot of specialized knowledge and discipline, browsers have slightly different implementations and feature sets, tooling is still immature, and debugging in multiple environments is problematic. All of these factors add up to developers needing a vast knowledge ...