A new-comer nightmare, the learning curve and best-practices

Hello everyone

Just to clarify, this post is not a technical question, it's more me
putting out there my concerns and hoping for guidance (not work to be
done for me), so that is out of the way.

Note: I read documentation, so i'm not talking in the dark completely.

My objective: I want to learn this new technologies: Spring Framework
(server-side) and GWT (client-side). I have done some projects with
Spring already, so that is tackled.

So now i started exploring GWT. Integration between GWT and Spring
seems to be very simplified with RequestFactory. I haven't played with
it yet but I already found a couple of articles about it. Should it be
a separate project from the Spring one? It makes sense to be, but then
where do I deploy GWT? To the Spring webapp/WEB-INF folder? (This
might be a question for Spring forums)

Now comes pure GWT. First the design pattern MVP. I know it but never
used it. I read about it and I saw the "Large scale application
development and MVP" example. The feeling I get is that it requires an
awful lot of code to build the simplest app. I understand that "large
scale" and "enterprise ready" key works implies a certain level of
complexity, but nevertheless, I feel overwhelmed.

There seem to be a couple of frameworks built on top of GWT that ease
this issue, namely gwt platform, but are they a solution? My
experiments showed that it uses Guice, which afaik is server-side.
Won't it conflict with Spring? (This might be a question for gwt
platform group)

After MVP comes the UI part. I do not have experience with UIs so GWT
UI Designer looked really tempting. I saw the Google IO 2011
presentation about it and I "fell in love". Some preoccupations arose
though. Can I build modular UIs with header, menu, and containers that
vary in content? Is GWT suited to build an entire web app? Or only the
parts of it?
I mean, taking a common website that has "Home", "Contacts", "About",
is GWT suited to serve all this items? Or only the contacts part,
leaving the rest for another technology?

I have found a lot of documentation across the internet but it all
feels sparse, unrelated between each other or unrelated to my
objectives. For a new comer like me it becomes hard to figure out how
this new technology works. And please take in consideration that I'm
new and inexperienced with this technology, so if i said something so
wrong that sounds like nails on a chalkboard I apologize.

Well, I think I left here my more recent thoughts and fears. Once
again I'm not looking for work to be done for me, I'm asking for your
experience and guidance to find the right path.

Thank you in advance and I apologize for the length of the post
All the best and happy 2012

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