Book Image

Google Web Toolkit 2 Application Development Cookbook

By : Shamsuddin Ahammad
Book Image

Google Web Toolkit 2 Application Development Cookbook

By: Shamsuddin Ahammad

Overview of this book

GWT 2 radically improves web experience for users by using existing Java tools to build no-compromise AJAX for any modern browser. It provides a solid platform so that other great libraries can be built on top of GWT. Creating web applications efficiently and making them impressive, however, is not as easy as it sounds. Writing web applications for multiple browsers can be quite tasking. In addition, building, reusing, and maintaining large JavaScript code bases and AJAX components can be difficult. GWT 2 Application Development Cookbook eases these burdens by allowing developers to quickly build and maintain complex yet highly efficient JavaScript front-end applications in the Java programming language . It tells you how to make web experience all the more thrilling and hassle free, using various tools along with GWT SDK.This book starts with developing an application from scratch. Right from creating the layout of the home page to home page elements including left and right sidebars, to placing tree like navigational menu, menu bars, tool bars, banners, footers are discussed with examples. You will see how to create forms using the Ext GWT library widgets and handle different types of events. Then you will move on to see how to design a database for sales processing systems and learn to create the database in MySQL with the help of easy–to-follow recipes. One of the interesting topics of this book is using JPA in GWT. Using the JPA object in GWT is a challenge. To use them perfectly, a mechanism to convert the JPA object into plain object and vice versa is required. You will see recipes to use entity classes, entity managers, and controller classes in GWT application. You will efficiently create reports with parameters, variables and subreports, and get the report output in both HTML and PDF format using real-world recipes. You will then learn to configure the GlassFish server to deploy a GWT application with database. Finally, learn how to trace speed and improve perfomance in web applications using tracing techniques.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Google Web Toolkit 2 Application Development Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Building a project and creating the WAR file


The building process of the GWT application includes creating the web directory structure, compiling Java files to class files, copying library files, compiling GWT client-side code, and creating the WAR files.

Getting ready

Before starting to deploy, we need to create the WAR file containing all the required project files. "WAR" stands for "Web Application Archive". WAR is a JAR file that contains the Java classes, Java Server Pages, Servlets, library files, static web pages, and so on, as necessary. The WAR file is used to distribute the application files in a single file. In this recipe, we are going to create the WAR file for our GWT application using the NetBeans IDE.

How to do it...

The steps required to complete the task are as follows:

  1. Go to Project Properties | Libraries.

  2. Under the Compile tab, check all the checkboxes for the files to be packaged, as shown in the previous screenshot.

  3. Go to Build | Packaging, click on Add File/Folder button...