that's great…

I have a more detailed post in the works, but until then, let’s just say using Spring to wire your GWT components is ridiculously easy. I ran into some issues, but thanks to a post from pgt, I was able to work through them.

In short, write your GWT-Dispatch (gwtd) and GWT-Presenter (gwtp) code (Actions, Results, ActionHandlers, etc) as you normally would. I prefer setter-based injection, so I make sure my dependencies all have public setters. Once your code is structurally ready, add Spring @Component annotation to the classes that will require DI. Next, add the @Autowire annotation to the to-be injected setters/fields. I kid you not, it’s that simple.

With that said, the real work is knowing what and how to define your Display interfaces. It’s more UI abstraction than I’m used to. Regardless, it’s worth it – really makes testing the UI easy.

Ray Ryan has another talk on creating great GWT apps. This time his primary focus was on creating “production” ready applications. A number of things are required to do this. Things like Built-in logging support for GWT, and User Actions (instrumented Widgets), guarding against Cross-Site Attacks, etc. Some of this is less about the technology of GWT, and more about the consciousness of the developers.

Building on his talk from the previous year, he of course mentions the MVP (Model-View-Presenter) pattern. However, this time around, Spring’s Roo is used to build the apps, which changes a few things. It seems some people were complaining (loudly?) about the Presenter pattern requiring a good deal of boilerplate code. So, he describes how using Roo actually eliminates a reasonable amount of code – namely the DTOs and Presenters. When using Roo, the DTOs and Activity (similar to Android’s Activity) instances are generated for you. It seems that the Activity replaces the Presenter. As with last time, he explains how coding this way reduces the effort needed to build complete GWT tests. Again, definitely worth a watch!

Awesome talk, great slides! If you aren’t already impressed by GWT (aka Swing for the all browsers 😉) , this talk should bring you over. This gave a number of new ideas. One of them is obviously the MVP pattern. Ryan attributes this to the great Martin Fowler. So, I went to Fowler’s site looking for more, and found this retirement note.

I’m also now looking forward to using the the EventBus architecture. It reminds me of the one of the driving forces behind some organizations using SOA. It just makes sense. In my unit tests, I’m still a Luddite – at least in my use of Mock objects… Uh, the lack thereof. However, I’m sold on the style he presented.

I’m a long time Spring user, so not sure where I stand on moving to Gin and Guice for GWT. But when I looked, I didn’t see a Google OS project for easy Spring/GWT integration. Unless I’m missing something I don’t think I’ll have much of a choice.