Is it possible to use UiBinder with SmartGWT at all? I've heard that at the moment it's impossible, though there are efforts to bridge the gap. How are those efforts? Have they yielded any successes yet?
Furthermore, if SmartGWT is still not UiBinder-friendly yet, are there any other GWT libraries that might be? ext-GWT, perhaps?
Not with UiBinder, but it is possible with GWT Designer which can be found here.
Then simply right click on the project or package in which you want to use SmartGWT, select Google Web Toolkit and then Configure for using SmartGWT.
Hope that gets you started!
Edit: GWT-Ext is also included, as you will see when right clicking.
Related
Is there anywhere a ready to use "RichText Toolbar" for GWT?
It would be good if there would always be the source-code available, so that changes to the toolbar can be made easily.
Thanks for your tips
Google is your friend (second hit on google). But anyway: I'm maintaining a little project at google-code: GWT RichTextToolbar. It can be used under the Apache2.0 licence and you can download all sources from there. It is easy to modify the project.
An explanation how to use this widget you will find on my blog.
The Widget is "standalone" and has no dependencies. I think it is what you are looking for.
Google has a RichTextToolbar in his GWT code.
I am a student getting started with web development with GWT. I have previous experience with Java however I am no UI design experience.
However I believe I can catch up on CSS easily.
I was browsing the official Google's UiBinder document, which is very concise(one page). I am not able to figure out much just from this document. It might be that things are not much obvious to me at the moment due to lack of experience in this field.
How should I dig deeper and get hang of designing UI with uibinder?
Any resources and strategies can be of great help.
I'd try using GWT designer which is part of the Google Plugin for Eclipse. It'll add handlers to buttons / forms / widgets for you and populate uifields in the Java classes. I've found just playing around with it helped me quickly find UIBinder features. You can easily switch between XML and design mode if you want to see what it's creating for you.
is there any drag and drop environment to work with GWT widgets.
or any user friendly IDE or plugin on IDE's
i remember using some thing like MyEclips for developing Hibernate was better then working with .xml files.
The Eclipse-based WindowBuilder Pro supports GWT and is now free, courtesy of Google.
I tried GWT Designer, http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/tools/gwtdesigner/index.html, but I think for now I'll stick to code the guis myself by hand.
The main reasons are:
Sometimes, it takes a little while (longer than I can wait) to load the design mode.
Sometimes it breaks after you modify code underneath.
Sometimes, does not do what you expect it to do.
I would suggest you giving it a try and see if it works out for your needs.
In my opinion, the experience using it has been frustrating than encouraging.
I have my first GWT project that I created using UiBinder (GWT 2.0 way) which I found to be easier than write my UI creation Java source code (GWT 1.0 way).
But I saw this thing called GWT Designer that Google are releasing for free. It has nice features and wizards which were missing with the standard Google Eclipse Plugin. I like it, but I still think that using UiBinder is better. I think GWT Designer will be really useful when it can help you write UiBinder XML files (GWT 2.0 way), and not just source code (GWT 1.0 way).
What do you think about it?
Do I need to migrate to GWT Designer project?
Will it be better if I migrate but still keep UiBinder UI creation?
The latest GWT Designer now has support for UiBinder, and it works great.
http://download.instantiations.com/D2GWTDoc/continuous/latest/docs/html/wizards/gwt/uibinder_composite.html
UiBinder can give you better performance and a better optimized download than traditional widget construction; to me that's enough of a reason to stick with UiBinder. If your app is light and fast enough as it is then the choice probably comes down to what style of development suits you best.
I wouldn't go as far as to port your existing UiBinder templates into the designer. Google will be adding support for them to GWT designer soon enough.
I haven't used the newly-freed GWT Designer yet myself, but I wouldn't expect that it would warrant migrating your entire project over to it if it's already written using UIBinder.
Remember that the two methods of constructing a UI are not mutually exclusive -- you can use the GWT Designer to create a new widget and use it in an existing UIBinder project, and if you decide it's that much better, you can consider migrating at that point. Or not, since they can still happily coexist.
If you are doing professional development in an organization that utilizes experts in CSS and html, then GWt is going to be a tough sell if you don't use something like UIBinder for layouting as well as individual pages. I also think that a CSS designer can do a better job at responding to UI requirement changes than a java developer using GWT layouting techniques.
However if your java staff has control of the requirements and don't have to answer to UI designers, then I suppose choosing between delcarative templates and something like GWT Designer is just a matter preference.
As said in the relaunch announcement:
Now that these products are available again, we hope you’ll start using them within your GWT projects. Meanwhile, our next step is to more deeply unify them into the GWT family of tools by blending the fantastic Instantiations technology into the Google Plugin for Eclipse (GPE). So, there’s much more to come, including things we’re pretty sure you’ll like, such as UiBinder support in GWT Designer.
It wouldn't make sense to get ride of your UiBinder code since GWT Designer will support it soon.
DON'T use the designer plugin. The most recent update (8.1.1 at the time of this post) contains buttons that allow the user to add elements that are incompatible with IE, for instance CellTable, DeckPanel, HorizontalPanel and VerticalPanel.
This means whoever uses the plugin, uses it entirely at their peril. If IE7 tries to pull in these elements, it will load a partial page but fail to load components that use these elements. IE8 may not be able to load the application at all.
I need recommendations from people whom have implemented an easy to use GWT editable datagrid.
I spent 4 hours with the PagingScrollTable in the gwt-incubator-july-14-2009.jar, and would now like to try other options.
What I'm looking for:
easy to get started (ex. drop a jar, edit .gwt.xml)
advanced features once you have gotten started
documentation of advanced features
self-contained module with minimal dependencies on other modules, jars or components
low cost/free
Thats all :)
Please, for goodness' sake, stick with vanilla GWT. Just use GWT data cell tables, lists and trees.
Smart-GWT and GXT really look good in their demo. e.g., Smart-GWT has widgets that accepts xml/json datasource directly that would save you time.
But, you find that your application requirements would "just need that tiny tweak" in the way the widget eats the datasource. Both GXT and Smart-GWT have attractive convenient widgets, but you find you need "just a little" tweak to make them suit your requirement.
Is your "little" tweak "important" enough? So, you resort to writing your patch for that "little" tweak. And soon you find that there is a whole entrail of "little" tweaks. You experiment and research and try untried means.
Finally, you discover that you might just as well had used vanilla GWT for which you would have taken less time to get the behaviour you want. Vanilla GWT is tried and proven.
Do not be tempted by the showcases of SmartGWT or GXT. Learn CSS and learn how to integrate CSS into vanilla GWT, which would make your widgets just as attractive as SmartGWT or GXT.
Then you would not regret because you would not face any impediments toward using other GWT features.
What is good enough for Google is good enough for me.
Hi HJO there are many solutions to problem depends on what you want. The GWT-EXT, EXT-GWt and SmartGWT libraries all have editable data grid implemented. Or you can make your own with FlexTable,ScrollPanel,TextBox and add a few event handlers. Both GWT-EXT and SmartGWT are in LGPL license and I believe EXT-GWT is GPL license. If you not doing it for production then any will do, but if you are doing it for big production environment I suggest to really test each of their performance first. I suggest to choose something light weight and robust instead of simplicity or appearance on production environments. At the end, the less data/widget loaded + less handlers = performance and happy user.
Take care,
NingZhang.info
I do not recommend to use GWT DataGrid for production (in GWT 2.4), unless you like coding workarounds for several bugs (most of them on Internet Explorer):
http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit/issues/detail?id=7065
http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit/issues/detail?id=7347
http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit/issues/detail?id=7139
http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit/issues/detail?id=6747
I use CellTable instead of DataGrid and wait for bugfixing from GWT team.