Re: Revisiting Support for GWT Designer

A bit off topic, but:  The real value of GWT for me has been the ability to write browser apps without HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Java (you know, spaghetti) - being able to use Java only.  As you start adding HTML and CSS to GWT apps  (the UI part), I question the whole value of GWT.  In that case, what is the difference between using GWT with HTML/CSS vs. something like Angular.js?

I think the big payoff with GWT is the one language and magic integration between front and back ends.  This is big.  Being able to add HTML/CSS on one-off, special cases is cool too.  Pushing towards more HTML/CSS is totally missing the point.  For those of us not "pretty well with HTML + CSS in general", the appeal of GWT could be lost. 

GWT Designer was extremely nice, again, for those of us not "pretty well with HTML + CSS in general".

Blake

On Fri, Jan 2, 2015 at 7:12 PM, Jens <jens.nehlmeier@gmail.com> wrote:

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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