Login  Register

Re: OFBiz-GWT Projects for bulding user interface with GWT

Posted by Adam Heath-2 on Mar 11, 2010; 7:21am
URL: http://ofbiz.116.s1.nabble.com/OFBiz-GWT-Projects-for-bulding-user-interface-with-GWT-tp1570621p1588528.html

Scott Gray wrote:

> On 10/03/2010, at 11:33 PM, Ean Schuessler wrote:
>
>> ----- "Scott Gray" wrote:
>>> I'm not sure about Google Maps but gmail doesn't use GWT.
>> That's weird. If you google "gwt" the summary record in the google results says " Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers". Looking further, however, I see several other people saying definitively that Gmail is not GWT. The GWT page says some definitive things about what *is* written in GWT (Wave, AdWords) but not so much about what is *not*. Google should do something about that nasty disinformation.
>>
>> I also have genuinely used and experienced the portability of GWT and it is quite real. I know I also saw an interview with the Rasmussen Brothers where they went off about how much porting effort GWT saved them on Google Wave and they were the guys who wrote Google Maps. I'm now curious to read a straight answer on where Google is actually using it.
>
> Just to clarify I don't know anywhere near enough about GWT to make a comment, except to say that when I had to do some work on opentaps it took forever to compile and I regularly got the "A script in this page is taking a long time to load, would you like to abort?" warning from the browser.  I didn't actually deal with any GWT code.
>
> As always there are a million great libraries but until some analysis is done we'll never find the one that might remove the UI framework burden from OFBiz.  For example, I think Apache Cocoon has some interesting ideas but I wouldn't start a thread about it until I could justify why it might be a good fit for what OFBiz needs (not criticizing anyone who does that, it's just seems to never come to anything).

Just for reference, websites produced by brainfood are using gwt, but
in a *very* limited fashion.

We have a feature that allows partial page loads, using ajax history.
   GWT is used to manage this.  GWT is what registers listeners on all
<a> in a page.  GWT is what is used to manage the browser history,
using "#foo" as part of the url in the location bar.

However, we've configured GWT to call back into normal javascript; our
own ajax server calls.  GWT is only used to manage clicks on <a> and
history mutation events.  The rest of the support is in hand-written
javascript, based on jquery.

However, even this doesn't fully explain it.  We wrote a GWT->jquery
wrapper, so that when GWT needs to find all the <a> to install it's
listener, it is actually calling into the native jquery library to do so.

GWT is fine.