Thursday, February 18, 2016

Re: GWT Material Design

Hi Stefan,

I'm an active contributor to the project, and I only became a contributor after seeing how productive and fun it is to build cool stuff - and of course after seeing that the team is inspired and productive.

Currently I'm using GWT Material in two different projects. In one, I'm porting an old GWT app (made without UiBinder), converting all those VerticalPanels and Cell Widgets to the new, responsive components of GWT Material. I'm always submitting patches to make that process easier.

On the other project I'm building a new app from scratch. The projects are completely separate from each other - they have no shared codebase. So I'm dealing with both perspectives: creating a new app, and porting an old one.

I'd say that porting is not trivial. But it's not GWT Material's fault: I'm trying to convert a complete tabular app to a responsive design one, and that's no easy task. Maybe I could blame GWT to make me think that using Vertical/HorizontalPanels would be a good idea. But the App is old (the first version was released in 2011), so there's a lot of cleaning to do.

There are plenty of components there are just like the AWT/Swing analogue: AWT has a Button, and Swing a JButton. In GWT we have a Button as well, and on GWT Material, a MaterialButton. And that applies to several components, such as MaterialListBox, MaterialCheckBox, MaterialTextBox and so on. So that's not the hard part. The hard part is to make everything responsible and fluid, and GWT Material does a really good job helping you on this, with the row/column system, the predefined 3 screen sizes for the whole application, and so on.

When creating a new app, everything just work. Of course eventually you find something that needs some tweaking, but the framework is getting mature and more feature complete on a fast pace. It already has more components than its parent project, Materializecss.

So I think it worth a try, at least on a small project, for you to see if it fits your needs. I'm a experienced GWT developer, and the project surprised me on how easy is to create stunning apps without trouble. One of the main complaints about the pure GWT is the poor Widget library. GWT Material fixes just that: you can have a small client compiled code, type-safe environment, same object model shared between server and client, AND a stunning, responsive and fluid UI too.

--
Gilberto

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