Re: Revisiting Support for GWT Designer

Probably the wrong forum since GWT Designer was never managed by the GWT team itself at Google. Making it a community project on Github is probably the best bet to keep it alive.

Generally I think UI designers can make code unreadable if you don't go the extra mile and give all elements a name, otherwise your variables often end up button1, button2, button3 in code. You also have to switch often between mouse to place components and keyboard to further adjust properties. Maybe GWT designer is better at these points but personally I always had the feeling I wasn't really slower without a UI designer.

In GWT you mostly use a HTMLPanel as root with normal HTML inside and with some other widgets here and there. So an alternative to GWT designer would be to just use any HTML editor (or even the browser itself, like Chrome workspaces) to create the HTML + CSS part of your UI. Then you copy it into your UiBinder file, making the root element a HTMLPanel and replace input elements and such with their corresponding GWT widget. Sure you still need to write the Java part of your UiBinder file but at least you can create the UI design mostly visual in your HTML editing tool of choice.

Personally I never used GWT designer and I am not feeling slow at writing UI layouts directly in UiBinder. On the other hand I am pretty well with HTML + CSS in general so it might be different if I would not have that knowledge. 

Maybe you just give raw UiBinder or any other HTML authoring tool a try.

-- J.

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