Development with GWT, one year down the road

With GWT being relatively new, it is now approaching a final build and may very soon be upgraded to production status and taken out of Beta. This is a good time to reflect on one year of GWT usage and my experiences so far.

When GWT came out, I was on an overnight standby and had all the time to look into the technology. I looked at the samples and very quickly got very enthusiastic. Now after one year, I still see the immense value that the toolkit provides and since the first release, many very important and cool changes and additions were made.

When Java came out, there was a lot of hype around the technology. Nowadays the Java language is accompanied by good practices and some people even have written rather large books about Java Design and coding patterns.

There are things one should know for GWT development as well. Many of the regular J2EE patterns are not exactly applicable to GWT overall, so many of the historic J2EE patterns are simply not useful.

A couple of things that I think every project should think out before starting on a GWT project:

• What is the final size of the project? Will it be possible to fit this in a single module (compiler memory usage) or is it necessary to modularize from the start? If so, how will this be modularized?
• How to structure components, modules and libraries to facilitate re-use of development in other projects as well? Use of imports!
• It is highly recommended to think about a strategy for history browsing and perma-links. See History class of GWT and "onHistoryChanged".
• Focus on the re-use of widgets and make developers aware of the importance of abstraction and reuse. I have found it is much more important to develop components that can be reused in different contexts than it is to solve a particular problem at hand in a particular way. Make sure to review that code.
• Test the application on different platforms and on different browsers as you go along.
• Develop the application on different platforms too. It makes sense to use Linux with FireFox and Mozilla by 2-3 developers of the project, where the other half uses Windows with maybe different versions of IE.
• If the project will get very large, consider running in "noserver" mode from the start of the project. You will have to model your development environment slightly differently to be able to achieve this.
• Develop proto-types of screens from the start. Do not develop screens before the proto-types are ready and you have an idea of the final Look and Feel of the application overall.
• Hire a CSS expert. Make sure that your CSS tag names and approaches are consistent, make sense with your developers and its development is aligned with the HTML approach that GWT embeds. Code the general look and feel into the "gwt-" tags. For cases that require different approaches, derive from other tags and apply the differences there.
• Give back to the community those cool things you are developing or document your innovative approaches. Post on the GWT newsgroups or help out with the development of one of those UI libraries out there. Some companies require specific legal sign-offs for contributing to open source projects.
  
• Program against interfaces where applicable, not against specific classes.
• Usability becomes much more important on the Internet. It's not just putting together some HTML pages anymore. Make sure you have someone on the team that understands usability issues and can design useful, easy screens for people to use.

Hope that helps. Good luck in your GWT projects!