Beginning Google Web Toolkit: From Novice to Professional [Paperback]

The book is well written but is now terribly out of date. The book was written for GWT version 1.5, but at the time of my purchase GWT 1.7 was the latest release. There were more differences than I expected. In just the first third of the book I found the following:

- applicationCreator.cmd is no longer a GWT command. It has been replaced by webAppCreator.cmd

- webAppCreator.cmd creates a different directory structure than the illustrated examples.

- The default application that GWT generates has changed.

- A new event model was introduced in GWT 1.6. Specifically, Listeners are replaced with Handlers. You will encounter this for the first time in chapter 3.

- While I was following the exercises using GWT 1.7, Google released GWT 2.0 which further obsoleted this edition. The 2.0 release introduced a declarative UI with UIBinder. Of course that won't be in this book. Also in 2.0 "Development Mode" replaced the "Hosted Mode" which is great but will confuse the novice using this book as guidance.

The only way this book would be helpful is if you download GWT 1.5 to follow along with the examples. I don't know many programmers, novice or otherwise, that would be content to learn a technology on an old release with deprecated methods and obsolete tooling.

I like the narratives of the book, I like the way it flows, and if the authors ever decide to publish a new edition with GWT 2.0 with the same style and accuracy it would probably earn five stars. Unfortunately the book is too many releases out of date (which is too bad considering it was just Copyrighted in 2008!)

I bought almost all the GWT books. I think this is best one to follow. The reasons are:
1. Follow 100 percent OO design.
2. Good Manager project architecture manager, use UI manager, data manager. Tell you how to manipulate UI and data in a large project.
3. Step by Step, go deeply to guide you how to design a big project
4. Basic asynchronous call, json, web service are covered.

This book stands out as a concise Java developers' introduction to GWT with a fantastic example application and a focus on good design. The example application is built up chapter by chapter and serves as a solid demonstration of how you can pimp your standard web app, GWT-style.

While other GWT book examples are stand-alone doodads that don't look much like webapps, this example really hit the spot. It covers logging in, has a (dynamic) left-side menu, titled modal popups, and a status panel. I actually used this app out-of-the-box as a template for my own first GWT application.

The introduction chapters give a lean overview of what you need to know to get you up and running (with proper browser tooling). It also gives a frank discussion of the advantages and current shortcomings of GWT. By chapter three you're programming using the GWT command line tools.

UI chapters follow and are a definite a strong point thanks to the coherent accompanying example application and an emphasis on good design principles. It's telling that the authors, all members of the pioneering Spring Source inner circle, reference Martin Fowler and Joel Spolsky when discussing these design principles (and pitfalls).

In the spirit of the "Separation of Concerns Principle" and avoiding bidirectional dependencies they advocate an application event structure. I eventually decided not to use it for my small app, but I can see the potential maintenance advantages for a large project.

The Server side chapter introduces GWT RPC, complete with a good exception handling strategy. It also discusses making vanilla HTTP requests for interfacing with any web service and explores using GWT's JSON libraries for communicating complex data structures.

There is a complete chapter on unit and functional testing with extensive coverage of Selenium. The authors correctly point out the drawbacks of GWT testing tools and encourage basic unit testing whenever possible. As a side note, the most advanced (purist) thinking on GWT testing comes from their colleague Rob van Maris[...]

The last chapter covers most everything else you'll need to crank out your GWT app including I18N, browser back support, image upload, and custom javascript inclusion.

The only thing I missed was maven integration, but I found that easily in the GWT docs.

Note: one reader was disappointed that there was no discussion of GWT Spring integration. IMO, Spring integration into GWT doesn't really warrant the complexity it introduces. I certainly use Spring on the server side of my app, but for the client-side (GWT-side) it adds very little. Rest assured that the authors, being from the Spring camp, emphasize similar best practices to the ones you'd encounter in Spring (testability, separation of concerns, 00 design, simplicity).