Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is an open source Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don`t speak browser quirks as a second language.
Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatibilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript`s lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile.
GWT helps you avoid many of these headaches while offering your users the same dynamic, standards-compliant experience. You write your front end in the Java programming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.
Here are some key features of "Google Web Toolkit":
· Create a Widget by compositing other Widgets. Lay out Widgets automatically in Panels. Send your Widget to other developers in a JAR file.
· To communicate from your web application to your web server, you just need to define serializable Java classes for your request and response. In production, GWT automatically serializes the request and deserializes the response from the server. GWT`s RPC mechanism can even handle polymorphic class hierarchies, and you can throw exceptions across the wire.
· No, AJAX applications don`t need to break the browser`s back button. GWT lets you make your site more usable by easily adding state to the browser`s back button history.
· In production, your code is compiled to JavaScript, but at development time it runs in the Java virtual machine. That means when your code performs an action like handling a mouse event, you get full-featured Java debugging, with exceptions and the advanced debugging features of IDEs like Eclipse.
· Your GWT applications automatically support IE, Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, and Opera with no browser detection or special-casing within your code in most cases.
· GWT`s direct integration with JUnit lets you unit test both in a debugger and in a browser...and you can even unit test asynchronous RPCs.
· Easily create efficient internationalized applications and libraries.
· If GWT`s class library doesn`t meet your needs, you can mix handwritten JavaScript in your Java source code using our JavaScript Native Interface (JSNI).
· We are in the process of building support for using Google APIs in GWT applications. Initially, we are providing support for Google Gears, the recently-launched developer product that extends the browser to allow developers to make web-based applications function even while offline. If you would like to download this library please visit the open source project. We are planning to add support for other Google APIs; if you`d like to help, please check out Making GWT Better.
· All of the code for GWT is available under the Apache 2.0 license. If you are interested in contributing, please visit Making GWT Better.
What`s New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
· Google API Discovery and Access - The number of APIs offered by Google continues to grow, and developers are taking advantage of these APIs by including features such as Google Maps overlays, Buzz streams, and Google Docs integration in their apps. To help you build these features GPE 2.3 adds the ability to browse and add Google APIs directly from Eclipse. Simply highlight a project and then select the "Google - Add Google API Reference" menu item to get started.
· Google Project Hosting Integration - GPE 2.3 also provides a simple UI that makes importing Google-hosted projects into Eclipse very easy. You can now click on the GPE icon within Eclipse, select "Add Google APIs..." and, after a few steps in the import wizard, have a project loaded within your workspace. From there, making changes and syncing them back to Project Hosting is all done within the IDE.
· Single Sign-on Support - In order to make it simple to work with these new services, GPE 2.3 has built-in single sign-on suppo...
