GWT in Practice

As others have stated, the use of patterns in this book is both sophisticated and clarifying. And I would second the recommendation made by another reviewer for Head First Design Patterns as a compatible and synergistic companion to this book.The original "classic" text on GWT was GWT in Action. When that book was published, GWT was new enough that the authors had to concentrate fairly heavily on introducing its unique features. This new book "gets over" that sense of newness and instead focuses on how general software design approaches (e.g., patterns) can be implemented using the tools made available by GWT. This subtle change of focus represents a maturation of GWT software development practice that parallels the growing maturation of the GWT community, and of the technology itself.A terrific "extra" that accompanies the printed book is the ability to download a searchable PDF of the entire book online using instructions provided in an insert. Once I had that, I hardly needed the printed book at all.One caveat: at least one example that I encountered (for the UserEdit class of chapter 4) had some typos (UserEdit made reference to a variable called address that was actually from a prior example, AddressEdit), and when I searched online for downloadable code, I found that this example had been significantly re-written (eliminating the problem in the process, amd also generally improving the example code's clarity).So, if you purchase this excellent book, be sure to download the sample code right away and then check it against the examples that are printed in the book as you go along. [...]It would have been nice if the authors had published errata on that same page, since apparently (from the downloadable examples) they encountered and corrected some problems, and in fact I have just noticed that there is an online forum for the book on the publisher's Web site [...] that mentions the problems with chapter 4 in multiple posts going back quite a long time, but I could not find any comprehensive listing of such errors by the authors themselves.Despite such annoyances, the book deserves five stars because of its otherwise exceptional insights and presentation.

This is an excellent book for learning GWT, but it does assume some background knowledge in other topics, so it is not the simplest book.I personally found that this book mentions and uses many design patterns, but if you have never studied design patterns (as a fair amount of computer scientists have not), then this book could be pretty difficult to follow.However, if you do understand design patterns, then you will know what the author is talking about and realize that all of the sample programs and apps that are designed are truly designed well. The author shows how to use and combine great coding techniques and patterns to develop a strong application that is flexible and extensible.Because of some of these assumptions, the textbook can be confusing, but if you do have the knowledge that is assumed, then this is an EXCELLENT textbook.(For design patterns, I recommend the book Head First Design Patterns - it is an excellent book that covers the major design patterns and is quite enjoyable to read. You will learn all the patterns needed in that book to be able to follow GWT In Practice).If you are looking to just make some simple apps in GWT but are not aiming for flexible, commercial level software, then you might want to look elsewhere for other textbooks. GWT In Action is much easier to follow, although it is a little dated now. However, it covers the basics of GWT which (at the time of this review) have not changed.

The samples used in this are so outdated that they are utterly useless. You would have to modify them to get them to work with the new GWT, which wouldn't be bad but they are a far departure from the new GWT. GWT has changed so much since this was printed that you would have to unlearn much of this. Many of the samples use deprecated methods. The whole structure of how a project is put together has changed. This references executables within the toolkit that are simply not used any more and not included. You would think that the author would at least have the courtesy to update the samples on the website, but there are no updates there. I wasted my money on this book. I would suggest using the online resources offered by Google. They are much more useful and will get you moving much faster. The PDF version of the book that is included with the book is a great idea, but this information is too outdated to be of any real value.

Some of the code examples use the GWT Maven plugin. Bad idea for two reasons: 1) It complicates the GWT application creation process, which doesn't need any more complications and 2) The GWT Maven plugin is ALREADY outdated and not compiled. Meaning you can use the old source from the GWT-Maven plugin, try to compile it, try to integrate it with Cooper/Collin's source code, try to get the projects to build...do ya see where I'm going with this? I'm not saying the GWT is a bad project, nor that Maven is a bad project. But when you start piling frameworks on top of frameworks when you're trying to learn something it becomes this big mess.

I bought this book based on its high ranking, but after reading through it I realized what a mistake it was. This book is super light on details and presents only basic concepts you can easily find on google. One specific instance was on file uploads where the book briefly mentions some basic template code on the client side. No mention of the server handling, nothing. Luckily I bought this book used or else I would have really been kicking myself. This used book goes for 4 bucks, tells you much just by the price. Don't be fooled.

The beginning of the book is a good introduction to GWT but then there is too much technical discussion to get started. Probably useful for supporting complex environments but way beyond my need. I'm looking at GWT and Google App Engine. Their tutorials worked better.

Das Buch beschreibt fortgeschrittene Themen zu GWT - für den Einstieg ist es daher nicht geeignet.Ich hatte vorher die offiziellen (und sehr guten) Tutorials durchgearbeitet, die Basics waren also schon vorhanden. Dennoch wurde ich mit dem Buch nicht glücklich. Gründe dafür sind:- start veraltet (mittlerweile gibt es u.a. andere Kommandoteilenbefehle, weitere Features / Vereinfachungen)- schlechte Strukturierung (z.B. kommt mehrmals der Hinweis "see listing XY", dieses ist aber dann oft nicht nur eine Seite, sondern manchmal ein ganzes Kapitel weiter vorne)- teilweise schwer verständlich (ich musste viele Passagen mehrmals lesen - nicht, weil es zu komplex war, sondern weil ich den Schreibstil einfach nicht verständlich fand)Trotzdem ist das Buch geeignet, wenn man sich tief in die beinhalteten Themen einarbeiten will. Dabei hilft dieses Buch sicherlich weiter, auch wenn es nicht ganz einfach zu lesen ist...

I have not had much luck with this thing. Most of it is already out of date. You have to go on-line to get good advice. I amhappy to try it "Manually" but there are no clear instructions on how to do this. It should say more about Ant, at least an appendix.I have Java code, not EE stuff, so maybe I don't need eclipse. And I am hoping it would write Cascading style sheets HTML.What's this about having to stop it before too long...? I give up.