Pro Web 2.0 Application Development with GWT (Expert's Voice in Web Development) [Paperback]

Jeff Dwyer (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1590599853 | ISBN-13: 978-1590599853 | Publication Date: May 13, 2008 | Edition: 1

Pro Web 2.0 Application Development by Jeff Dwyer is the first book on professional Web 2.0 principles that includes the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). GWT is one of the leading Java Ajax frameworks in market, and his very hot in terms of relative growth; can be integrated with other broader Java frameworks like JBoss Seam and possibly Spring.

This book's focus on a single, extremely rich, example “killer application” is the thing that sets this apart from other GWT titles.

The author is the Founder and CEO of MyHippocampus, which is a good showpiece of innovative uses of GWT. He is a current practicing Web developer using Web 2.0 and current Ajax principles along with GWT as his framework/toolkit of choice.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Jeff Dwyer is a software engineer by trade and is now the founder of MyHippocampus.com. He has recently come back to web development from a number of years of writing rich client software and is very pleased to see how powerful the browser has become. He likes nothing better than plugging together high quality open source code so he can focus on the core elements of his projects.

Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (May 13, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590599853
• ISBN-13: 978-1590599853
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,087,255 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Architect-Level Book, August 7, 2008

By 

Tyler (San Diego, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pro Web 2.0 Application Development with GWT (Expert's Voice in Web Development) (Paperback)

If you are looking for an architect-level view of how GWT can best be leveraged by your enterprise projects, Pro App Development with GWT is a great resource. The book goes through the steps in designing a robust Web 2.0 application using Spring, Hibernate, Lucene, and GWT. The finished application can be viewed online at www.tocollege.net.

For developers like myself who have worked with small-scale GWT projects, this book directly answers many of the issues that one encounters when scaling up the project. Examples of these issues are: the most effective way to pass Hibernate classes back to the client using GWT, and how to most efficiently handle a large project through either single (or multiple) modules.

Please note that this book will not teach you GWT; if you are not familiar with GWT, other books (or even the GWT website) would be superior resources.

The only two issues I had with this book were:

* It would be nice if there was chapter-by-chapter source code available so you could more easily mimic the steps in creating the application. Matching the chapter-by-chapter progress to the final source code was a little tedious.

* The author's choice of technologies for the back-end is great (Spring, Hibernate, FreeMarker templates), but if you are an EJB/JBoss/Seam/Wicket shop, you will be doing a lot of translation from the Spring-domain to your particular choice of technology.

Overall, this book is highly recommended and will make deploying GWT much easier on medium and large-scale projects. The author has done a great job in solving common GWT problems; issues that an enterprise architect will surely encounter when using GWT.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Should have been titled "Developing a Web 2.0 Site with GWT"., August 3, 2008

By 

Mike (CA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Pro Web 2.0 Application Development with GWT (Expert's Voice in Web Development) (Paperback)

This book is not about Application Development with GWT, it's about developing a web 2.0 site. Jeff takes you step by step through his process of developing www.tocollege.net, and frankly the site implementation is a little sloppy.

He covers his decision making process for the full stack and gives outlines of Maven, Acegi, Compass, Hibernate, Spring MVC, SiteMesh, FreeMarker as well as GWT and Gears. That's a lot to cover in around 400 pages. In fact I have 2 books on my desk that cover just Hibernate and Spring that weigh in at over 700 pages each, so obviously he doesn't go into much depth, but he does point you to online resources to dig deeper.

Because this book is not about developing a web 2.0 application using gwt (like it says on the cover) but it's actually about developing a web 2.0 site this means there is no discussion of integration with Javascript Libraries like gwtext, extgwt or Dojo, but it does discuss SEO and integration with Google maps for example.

Jeff does a decent job of covering some of the key pinch points and offers some good advice which is why I'm not giving this book 1 star.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Full of practical solutions, June 17, 2008

By 

Software Professional (San Jose,CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pro Web 2.0 Application Development with GWT (Expert's Voice in Web Development) (Paperback)

I was working on GWT in 2007 and looking for such book. Instead you post and post on forum to collect information about using GWT (1.4 days) with Hibernate and spring. It has other techniques that you learn while developing website but it is readily available in this book with GWT 1.5 support.