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Book Review – Google Web Toolkit Solutions

Posted December 25th, 2007 by Nazmul

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The Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is an open source Java development framework for building AJAX enabled web-applications. Google Web Toolkit Solutions by David Geary and Rob Gordon focuses on some of the more advanced aspects of GWT in an attempt to show readers what goes into building “real-world” applications. This book is not for GWT beginners and assumes that readers have at least some familiarity with GWT. It does have some introductory material, but only concepts that relate to the GWT applications being showcased are explained. A few core concepts such as GWT Object Serialization are skimmed over.

This book will show you how to:

Build Custom Widget Implementations (both Composite and low level Widgets)
Create resizable and draggable windows
Implement drag-and-drop in GWT
Create dynamically resizable layouts for GWT applications
Integrate popular JavaScript libraries like Script.aculo.us into an application.
Implement a viewport class that includes automated scrolling
Integrate web-services into GWT applications
Use Hibernate along with GWT to build a database-backed web application
Integrate GWT widgets with existing Struts and JSF applications
Deploy your GWT applications

If you feel you have a good grasp of GWT fundamentals and are ready to move on to something more substantial, this is the book for you. This book is chock full of useful information. The presentation of this information, however, is a little lacking. This book does what a lot of books do and relies heavily on code listings to explain everything. Allowing readers to walk through the code is an effective tool to teach readers how to put everything together at the implementation level. However, using large numbers of code listings also forces the reader to read through a lot of code that is spread across multiple pages. Having to go flip back and forth between multiple pages to figure out what is going on gets old real fast. I tend to find this very irritating and extremely tedious. Large code listings are more suitable in web based books and tutorials where you merely have to scroll up or down to view an entire code listing. This issue is somewhat mitigated by the fact that all the code, as well as demos, for all the applications built in the book are available for free at http://www.coolandusefulgwt.com/.

However, all the code is very well written and very well documented, and the explanations of the concepts are concise and easy to follow. At the end of the day, the information contained in this book is more than worth the minor hassle of the dredging through code listings.

If you don’t already have a copy, you can buy the book here.

To download all the code in the book and view demos of the applications built in the book, check out this site.

To post your comments and feedback, click here.

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