Question

Seen that writing GWT code is basically writing Java code, what does a GWT for an IDE exactly do? For example there are GWT plugins for IDEA and for Eclipse (and maybe for NetBeans?) but do they do that I cannot do simply by using Eclipse or IDEA without the GWT plugin?

Answer 1

I’ve only used the IDEA plugin myself. I definitely would not want to give it up. As others have said, you can create a GWT project and debug in hosted mode as easily as you would run any other application, but that’s only the beginning.

IDEA also has several GWT-specific class creation options. You can create a new UiBinder file, which will generate both the .ui.xml file and the Java file, and will already have the plumbing in place for creating the UiBinder object. You can create a new GWT Remote Service, which will create the service interface, async interface, and implementation class for you.

The GWT plugin will also warn you about tons of probable errors right in the editor. It will warn you if your service interface doesn’t have proper matching methods in the async interface, and has an intention for fixing the problem. It will warn if your service implementation class does not have an entry defined in the web.xml file (yep, with an intention available to automatically register it). It will warn you if you have fields in your UiBinder class that aren’t defined in the .ui.xml file, again with an intention to help resolve the issue with just a couple keystrokes.

On top of that, the code completion is excellent for everything including CSS attributes, Javascript, HTML, and the various XML files.