Question

I have been developing a plain JSP/Servlet web application, which focuses mainly in collecting large sets of data through JSPs, processing them and finally commiting them to a MySQL database. Imagine something like a declaration of assets for a pretty big number of people.

While it works pretty good now, the code is really jumbled up and since I now have the time, I am thinking of completely redesigning the whole application in a more sophisticated and reusable way. My main problem is that forms are built mainly through jQuery (my form_build.js and form_validate.js files span over 600 lines each at the moment), and the back-end java code is jumbled up since there is massive use of name[counter] input fields.

I.e. The user can add 5 assets in the form, where he has to submit something like 30 fields of information on each one. The form sends them in the form of attribute[asset_counter].

If I managed to make myself clear, I have been looking into the Google web toolkit – which I had no idea of before – and from what I gather mastering it will take some time for me. Is it worth the trouble, or is it aimed at something completely different? And is there a framework or technique that can handle efficiently what I need?

Answer 1

Frankly, I am a senior java developer and I used a lot of jsp/jsf web applications accompanied by EJB, webservice, simple spring web apps, and I recently came up to use GWT.
It’s a very nice platform, it has the following advantages:

1. All the code is compiled to html/JS which is better in terms speed
   and browser understanding agilty
2. It uses built in JSON xml transer (nice approach)
3. It use built in AJAX (nice approach)
4. It use it’s own cleint server platform (no need to use other
   libraries for each one)
5. It will adopt to any browser (strong competetor)

drowbacks:

1. Sometimes it takes time to load in the browser (specially when using
   FlexTables)

I advise you to use it!