Get ready to build the next generation Gmail, Facebook, or Meebo, with HTML5 and Server Push, taking advantage of the power and versatility of Java using ExtGWT. Sencha ExtGWT takes GWT to the next level, giving you high performance widgets, feature-rich templates and layouts, advanced charting, data loaders and stores, accessibility, and much more.
ExtGWT Rich Internet Application Cookbook will teach you to quickly build stunning functionality into your own apps, with ExtGWT.
This is a catalog of practical solutions to get your ExtGWT web app up and running in no time, with tips for persistence and best practices. You will begin by playing with panels, windows, and tabs, to learn the essentials. Next, you will engage with forms, buttons, toolbars, and menus, to build on your existing knowledge. Dealing with the UI and the trees will follow, to help you make stunning user interfaces. Then, you will be taught to work with Listview, Views, and Grids, the more complex problems. The book will then deal with charts, visualization, and drag-and-drop, to take you to the next level. Finally, you will wind up with serialization, persistence, and custom theming. And before you know it, you'll be an expert!
Chapter 1, Playing With Panels and Windows, deals with creating windows and different kinds of dialogs.
Chapter 2, Playing Hide and Seek with Tabs, explains how to create and manage tabs.
Chapter 3, Click-ware: Buttons, Toolbars, and Menus, describes how to create and align different types of buttons, how to create menus, and how to create toolbars and align buttons in toolbars.
Chapter 4, Crafting UI Real Estate, deals with the different layouts available in ExtGWT. Layouts such as AccordionLayout, BorderLayout, and CardLayout, as well as creating dashboards, are covered.
Chapter 5, Engaging Users with Forms and Data Input, deals with building forms, binding data into forms, and binding and retrieving remote data into a combobox.
Chapter 6, Data Hierarchy with Trees, introduces the Tree widget. The recipes in this chapter include building a tree, adding custom icons and context menus to the tree, adding checkbox selection to tree nodes, and building asynchronous trees.
Chapter 7, The Venerable Grid Component, presents ExtGWT's complex Grid component. The chapter's recipes demonstrate various features of this complex component, such as: formatting cell data, grouping data and headers, aggregating data, entering data into the grid, and data pagination.
Chapter 8, Templates and Views, introduces the Template component and its use for formatting data.
Chapter 9, Data Makeovers with Charts and Visualizations, deals with the various charts available in ExtGWT as well as drawing shapes with the Canvas class.
Chapter 10, Drag-and-drop, deals with the drag-and-drop mechanism available in ExtGWT as well as using a third-party library to do drag-and-drop, using HTML5.
Chapter 11, Advanced Tips, introduces various advanced topics, such as: using JPA (Java Persistence API) with GWT, using the MVP (model view presenter) pattern, and implementing a server-side push.
Chapter 12, Theming, explains how to use ExtGWT's existing UI themes, how to switch themes, and how to build a custom theme.
Appendix A, Event Handling — Making Those GUIs Do Something, explains ExtGWT's event-handling mechanism.
Appendix B, Custom Icons in GXT, explains how to add custom icons to your application.
Appendix C, GWT-RPC, describes GWT's RPC mechanism for client-server communication.
Appendix D, Jakarta Commons — FileUpload, demonstrates the use of Apache's FileUpload library for uploading files in a GWT application.
To work with GWT, Java SDK needs to be installed. It can be downloaded from here:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html
The GWT SDK as well as the GWT Eclipse plugin can be downloaded from here:
https://developers.google.com/web-toolkit/download
Sencha's ExtGWT library can be downloaded from the following location:
http://dev.sencha.com/deploy/gxt-2.2.5.zip
(The code recipes for this book were developed and tested with GWT 2.4, Java JDK 1.7, and GXT 2.2.5).
This book is intended for the intermediate to advanced Java developer who wants to build really cool and powerful web apps using cutting-edge Java technology and web standards. Knowledge of basic web technologies and a working GWT setup is needed. Basic knowledge of ExtGWT will be an advantage.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "Configure basic settings, such as a title with setHeading() and an initial dimension with setSize()."
A block of code is set as follows:
@Override
public void onModuleLoad() {
// create and set up window
Window basicWindow = new Window();
basicWindow.setHeading("GXT CookBook | Recipe One");
basicWindow.setClosable(true);
basicWindow.setSize(250, 50);
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "our dialog will be configured to use the OK and Cancel buttons combination, allowing the user to accept or decline the action presented by the dialog".
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