The bird-of-a-feather session “Real World, Not Hello World GWT Development for Java Technology Shops” was presented by Alex Moffat, Engineering Manager, Lombardi Software, and Luc Claes, CTO, ContactOffice. They showed two applications that were written with the Google Web Toolkit. Moffat showed his company’s application, BluePrint, and Claes showed ContactOffice.

The two discussed the skills needed to do GWT. GWT is simply Java with most of the libraries removed so Java developers will have no problem picking up coding. Techniques traditionally used for building GUIs still apply. Every member of the team must have an intimate knowledge of HTM and DOM, and the team must have at least one expert in CSS, understanding both style and layout.

Tools that are a must are Firebug a JavaScript and HTML debugging plugin for Firefox, the IE developer toolbar, and Charles, which is a web debugging proxy that allows the developer to change the parameters and headers of a request before submitting.

Testing GWT applications is hard because there is no automated way to test with a browser. The only way to test is manually. GWT Test Case is OK, but it is no silver bullet.

Both companies use Maven to build their applications. Maven shells out to ANT for the GWT compile. Some modules are compiled for GWT server side Java, and some of the code is compiled for the both the server and the client.

The companies deployed differently. BluePrint is deployed to multiple Jetty application servers to handle load. ContactOffice is deployed to Resin and uses only the HTTP container (i.e. They did not require multiple application servers).