Creating web applications with GWT designer

[lynas]

Hello,

thank you very much for the webcast on GWT Designer. I have serveral questions regarding the GWT Designer:

1. How do I define the flow in a GWT application. Lets say I press a button and another view opens?

2. What is the preferred persistance layer? Is it possible to use Hibernate for that?

3. Is a standard Validation or Help available for GWT defined forms or do I have to solve that myself using for instance my own composite?

4. How can I integrate frameworks like JFreeChart or Flash components?

5. Does GWT provide support for table sorting or pagination?

6. Is there a tree tabel widget for GWT available?

7. Can I simply run a GWT application created wit GWT designer on a tomcat?

8. Does GWT support the integration of Google maps?

Thank you very much in advance. It is really appreciated.

[Eric Clayberg]

1. How do I define the flow in a GWT application. Lets say I press a button and another view opens?

You will need to write your own code that will open the new view. It is up to you how you do this. You can, for example, remove the old view and add the new view. Or you could switch pages in a TabPanel. There are many ways to do this.

Do you have any specific suggestions on how this should be supported? Do you think that GWT Designer should provide more high level support for developing Web applications and provide some assistance for specific kinds of applications?

2. What is the preferred persistance layer? Is it possible to use Hibernate for that?

Hibernate is on the sever side, so in theory it is not related to GWT Designer. However again, if you think that we should add some support
in this area, describe what you're looking for. We could possibly add such support in the future.

3. Is a standard Validation or Help available for GWT defined forms or do I have to solve that myself using for instance my own composite?

No, there is no standard validation or help support in GWT.

4. How can I integrate frameworks like JFreeChart or Flash components?

JFreeChart is a server side component, so you can use RemoteServices to ask server part to create the PNG/GIF for you and display it in GWT.

You can use an HTML widget for displaying any HTML code, including references to Flash. You can also write your own custom widget that wraps displaying Flash in a simple interface.

5. Does GWT provide support for table sorting or pagination?

There are several extended Table widgets for GWT available in various open source libraries.

6. Is there a tree tabel widget for GWT available?

No. The new version of GWT (1.2) will support any widget as an item of a Tree, so you might be able to build a tree table based on that.

7. Can I simply run a GWT application created wit GWT designer on a tomcat?

Yes. See the GWT Designer Deployment Docs.

8. Does GWT support the integration of Google maps?

Yes, there is open source widget Google Maps widget.

BTW, a good place to ask general GWT questions is on Google's GWT Forum.

[lynas]

Hello Eric,

thank you for your reply.

I think it would be nice to have some kind of way to register pages or views with input and output variables and define some kind of webflow by linking the views together or assigning a view to an action or something like that.

Regarding hibernate I believe it would be nice to be able to define the data model and reference them in my remote services. Thus you would be able to define the persistence, the navigation and the UI within one single IDE.

I also believe that having some kind of extensible way to load other predefined composites would be nice. This could include a validation and help message composite. Almost all web applications need a way to provide context sensitive help or feed after some validation failed. Thus providing something like that as a default would be great.

Greetings,
Nima

[Eric Clayberg]

Those all sound like good ideas that we may explore in the future (especially if we broaden the scope of the tool from being a GWT GUI builder to being a complete GWT application construction tool).