Read me first!

I've been looking a bit at GWT (that's short for Google Web Toolkit, but you probably know that if you found this blog) for awhile, experimenting a bit. I haven't really gotten anywhere, especially regarding useful code or best practices. I'm hoping this blog will keep me going at it in a more methodical way, and also keep whatever I learn stored in an accessible way. Perhaps it can be of use to someone else!

Why GWT?
Well, my development experience comes primarily from doing small desktop applications, mostly in Java. I know the basics of HTML and CSS, but not enough to do fancy web pages. Add to that the whole AJAX thingy, and you'll find it's not all that easy to take the step to the web. Enter GWT. It's like developing desktop applications, with a desktop feel, and you really don't need to know all that much about HTML and CSS (at least not to get started). You're programming in Java and compile to HTML and JavaScript, and it will run the same on all modern browsers. I think that's pretty neat!

Why start this blog?
My primary concern with GWT is that's it somewhat difficult to find books up to date with the latest version of GWT (as of this writing it's version 2.0 released in december 2009, with 2.1 around the corner), and suitable to my needs. Searching Amazon for GWT books, it seems there's one coming out later this summer that's covering GWT 2.0. The ones released the past year is covering older versions and they seem tied to Google App Engine and such, which I'm not interested in. Googles own page is shaping up with pretty decent tutorials, but when I first looked at GWT it was at version 1.5 or something, and the same couldn't be said back then. (I'm going to come back to Googles page on GWT in a later posting.) But still, if you're like me those tutorials doesn't really give you all that you need. So, hopefully this blog can be of use to someone, but if not then I have at least saved me knowledge for future use by myself!

Also, I'm a hobbyist when it comes to developing, so much of the pages I come across elsewhere on the web is a bit over my head. They're also generally focusing on "enterprise development", much like most of the books out there. By that I mean that more often than not they describe developing a GWT application with a servlet backend, or something along those lines. Personally I don't have my own server set up (at least not for outside access, I'm using a virtual server for development, which I'll be getting back to in a later posting I hope), and if you're a hobbyist like me you probably have one of the cheaper web hostings which don't let you deploy Java servlets. Instead, I have done some GWT experimenting together with PHP/MySQL (they always seem to come hand in hand, don't they?) and JSON. That's something that you'll find on most web hostings I believe.

In a nutshell
So in a nutshell you could say that the focus of this blog will be GWT development for personal use, as opposed to what I call enterprise use. This is not a "Learn how to program" blog, but rather a way for hobbyist programmers to find their way into GWT. I don't know if I'll be going into details all that much, you probably won't find much code here, at least not at first, but rather postings describing my practices. I'll be using Java (of course), some HTML and CSS, PHP and MySQL (perhaps some SQLite or flat file databases as well). I think I'll add a gadget to the page with upcoming blog posts...