MyGWT + ITMill Support

[eliasbalasis]

Recently I discovered that, apart from the well known MyGWT (thanks to Darrell), there is another equally promising UI toolkit based on GWT.
It is called ITMill (http://www.itmill.com) follows the GWT paradigm (write only in Java), implements it differently but provides GWT equivalents of its components. Additionally, it is extensible so that custom ITMill components can always be integrated with GWT by providing their GWT equivalents.

I believe that if the same practices followed with MyGWT are followed with ITMill then GWT Designer could integrate without problems with both toolkits and either with default or custom UI widgets.

Any ideas/comments?

[Eric Clayberg]

I believe that if the same practices followed with MyGWT are followed with ITMill then GWT Designer could integrate without problems with both toolkits and either with default or custom UI widgets.
Any ideas/comments?

As long as ITMill provides default constructors for each widget and getters/setters for each property, there is a very good chance it would work in GWT Designer.

[peterblazejewicz]

hi,

@elias
there is a difference between MyGWT and IT Mill UI components, MyGWT was written for direct usage by developers while IT Mill UI (GWT part of IT MIll suite) is kind of UI adapter to original java UI toolkit developed for crossbrowsers support (For example original IT Mill Button component is coded in web based project and then it is converted to its GWT counterpart (IButton) and filled with properties at client side). So I cannot just get IButton widget and use it (technically I can - that is just subclass of GWT Button class - but it does not have any properties that are inherent to IT MIll framework which are filled at runtime once application is loaded),

As Eric mentioned if UI elements keeps some UI-related beans design (not-Pojo, but Bean/JavaBean) they work:

design view screenshot

itmill.jpg (48.87 KiB) Viewed 1444 times

However they are not very usable at current stage of implementation (as being kind of adapter to non-GWT translatable directly IT Mill components),

Maybe they will be changing that so GWT uses could directly useIT Mill toolkit without need of using gwt adapter for front-end,

regards,
Peter

[Eric Clayberg]

Sun long ago understood that a market for reusable, interchangeable components required a set of standards that all components would conform to (and that tools like GUI builders could rely on). The JavaBean spec has been in place for an eternity in the Java world and has fostered several generations of 3rd party widgets in the Swing world (as well as a wide variety of GUI tools to consume them). The Eclipse SWT world uses a slightly modified version of that standard, but then adheres to it pretty rigorously with all of its widgets. The GWT widget world, in contrast, is very immature and every toolkit wants to use its own unique API that is inconsistent with the base GWT widgets and with every other GWT widget package. I would hope that Google would take some leadership here and endorse and formally support the existing JavaBean standard. They have de facto support for it with their own base widgets, but they haven't done anything to establish standards for 3rd party widgets.

The JavaBean standard is simple and well thought out. There is really no good reason for a GWT widget not to conform to it. In fact, it is generally very simple to add a default constructor to most widgets that uses a suitable set of defaults in the place of a complex constructor. The folks behind MyGWT seem to be moving in the right direction, and I have heard that gwt-ext may follow as well. If ITMill is serious about supporting GWT, they should do so as well.

[joonaslehtinen]

I really like the idea of using GWT Designer for creating IT Mill Toolkit layouts. As IT Mill Toolkit is designed for developing UI on server-side, I would guess that adding IT Mill Toolkit code-generation for GWT Designer will take quite a bit of work. On the other hand, one could use GWT Designer just for layouting the client-side widgets, serialize the layout and (some) component initialization parameters to XML; then pass that XML to a method on server-side that would initialize the components and layout them dynamically runtime. This would not be the best possible solution, but would be simple to implement.

- Joonas / IT Mill

[Eric Clayberg]

As IT Mill Toolkit is designed for developing UI on server-side, I would guess that adding IT Mill Toolkit code-generation for GWT Designer will take quite a bit of work.

Yes. With GWT Designer, we are focusing on widgets that conform to normal GWT widget practices. The closer a toolkit matches those conventions, the easier it will be for us to add support for. We have added some preliminary suport for MyGWT based on their most recent relesse and we are currently working on GWT-Ext as well.