Re: Tool to convert HTML in GWT widgets

Please open up the code and help us to learn it. Thanks in advance.

On Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 3:02:08 AM UTC+5:30, Davi Pires wrote:

Hi all,

In my company, we have been working with GWT for almost a year,
developing a ridesharing application (http://www.bigoo.com.br). I
really can't overstate how much we enjoy developing in java, using
familiar tools, debugging in hosted mode, and so on. But one thing
that has really bothered us for a long time is the dificulty of
integrating the work of developers (who write the code that eventually
outputs the HTML) with the work of designers (who write CSS).

Eventually we came up with a method where the designer gave the devs
an HTML fragment that worked as a 'contract' between their codes. The
devs had to write the GWT code that instantiated the widgets and set
ids and styles according to the spec. It worked, we did the job, but
there were lots of problems on the way:

- every little change to the 'contract' (new id, new classes) had to
be implemented by the developer. Therefore, there was a significant
delay between the designer's writing of the css and it being reflected
on the system.
- the designer felt rather demotivated by not having control over
generation of the UI.

Well, I guess some of these problems have already been mentioned here.
I won't dwell on it anymore.

Recently we implemented a small tool to help us overcome this problem.
In short, the designer writes the specs in an extended subset of HTML,
outside of the java code, in a properties file. This file is processed
by a generator we wrote that outputs the java code needed to
instantiate the gwt widgets corresponding to that spec.

In the GWT code we can retrieve each subnode of the tree (or
'subwidget') by the id, and add to it the appropriate handlers, or set
any other property.

We have automated the instantiation of the widgets, their addition the
the corresponding parents, the setting of a few properties such as
ids, classes, titles, value and enabled. It has allowed us to
reimplement complete pages, with all the interaction we had before,
significantly speeding up the development process, reducing the size
of the code, making it more readable, and increasing developer and
designer satisfaction.

I'd like to ask the community if anyone is interested on such a tool.
We are planning on opening up this code, but it still needs some work.
If it's of anyone's interest we would gladly open it.

Cheers,
Davi Pires


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