developerlife – Reviews & How-tos » Book Review – Google Web Toolkit Applications

Book Review – Google Web Toolkit Applications

Posted January 7th, 2008 by Nazmul

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The Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is an open source Java development framework for building AJAX enabled web-applications. This is a review of Google Web Toolkit Applications by Ryan Dewsbury. Ryan Dewsbury is the creator of GPokr and KDice, two of the more popular GWT applications around. Google Web Toolkit Applications is a book that aims to teach its readers how to build web applications using GWT and is suitable for both GWT neophytes as well as those with prior GWT experience.

The book can be seen as being made up of two distinct halves. The first half of the book focuses on walking the reader through the fundamentals of GWT such as the GWT UI framework, the GWT RPC framework, etc. Readers can also learn how to set up their development environments to begin writing GWT applications.

The second half of the book walks the reader through the creation of five applications with aim of showing the reader how to:

Build Custom Widget Implementations (both Composite and low level Widgets)
Use CSS to style Widgets
Implement Drag and Drop in GWT
Interact with existing web APIs including, Google Maps API, Google Ajax API, GData (Google Base), Google AuthSub, Blogger Service, Yahoo Weather, Yahoo Web Services (Search), Flickr, Amazon Web Services (Books), RSS, and Atom.
Interact with Native JavaScript libaries, or create your own using GWT’s JavaScript Native Interface (JSNI)
Use GWT RPC to implement remote services.
Create a GWT code generator to serialize and de-serialize JSON and XML.
Create applications that use HTTP Sessions
Use Jetty Continuations, or Comet on Tomcat for implementing service to client event notification

I found the book to be a mixed bag. I like the fact that this book isn’t just a bunch of code listings with some explanations pasted around them. There isn’t a listing that is longer than a page and in the first half of the book the listings are very easy to follow and the explanations are effective enough. Things however change as I moved into the second half of the book. As the applications start to get more complex both the code and the author’s explanations get more confusing and difficult to follow. Most of the confusion stems from some poor class and variable name choices that make it difficult to keep tabs of what you are looking at in the code. The explanations of what is going on aren’t very well written. The writing is average at best. I found that it was a lot of work to read this book. I had to re-read sections more that once to get the gist of what was going on. That is not a good thing.

However, the book does highlight a lot of techniques that can be used to build non-trivial applications in GWT. It is full of useful information and after finishing you should have a pretty solid idea of how to build solid, feature rich GWT applications.

At the end of the day, I found the book to be ok. The book was useful to me and I learned quite a bit from it. It just took forever to get through it due to the average writing and confusing code.

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

To view demos of the five applications built in the book, check out these links:

To download the source code from the book click here.

To post your comments and feedback, click here.

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