Question

When to use HyperLink and when to use Anchor?

When using HyperLink how to handle clicks?
com.google.gwt.user.client.ui.Hyperlink.addClickHandler(ClickHandler) is deprecated
com.google.gwt.user.client.ui.Hyperlink.addClickListener(ClickListener) is deprecated as well.

Doc suggests to use Anchor#addClickHandler, but how to use Anchor#addClickHandler when using HyperLink

Does it mean that if I need to handle click I should always use Anchor and never use HyperLink?

Answer 1

Great question, because it is so simple, and yet opens up what might be a whole new area for a lot of GWT programmers. I’ve up-voted the question just because it can be a great lead-in for people exploring what GWT can do.

Anchor is a widget for storing and displaying a hyperlink — essentially the <a> tag. Really not much more exciting than that. If you want your page to link to some external site, use anchor.

Links are also used for internal navigation. Let’s say I have a GWT app that requires the user to login, so on my first panel I put a login button. When the user clicks it, I would display a new panel with widgets to collect the user’s information, code to validate it, and then if validated successfully, reconstruct that first panel the user was on.

Buttons are nice, but this is a browser, and I want my user’s experience to be more like a web page, not a desktop app, so I want to use links instead of buttons. Hyperlink does that. The documentation for hyperlink describes it well:

A widget that serves as an “internal” hyperlink. That is, it is a link
to another state of the running application. When clicked, it will
create a new history frame using History.newItem(java.lang.String),
but without reloading the page.

Being a true hyperlink, it is also possible for the user to
“right-click, open link in new window”, which will cause the
application to be loaded in a new window at the state specified by the
hyperlink.

That second sentence should help clear it up. The hyperlink is not changing the page in a URL sense (the way anchor does), though the URL will reflect the state of the program by displaying the “token” associated with the hyperlink appended to the base URL after a slash. You define the token. It would be something descriptive like “login” or “help” or “about”. But this isn’t a new page. There is no additional HTML file you’ve had to construct to display a help page, for example. It is the state of the current GWT app that is changing. Even if you “open in a new window” you are just running the same app in a particular state.

It looks like a link, but it is really a widget that manipulates the history frame, which in turn allows you to move the state of your GWT application. You don’t write a click handler for the hyperlink widget, but a value change handler for the history stack. When you see that the “help” token has been put on the history stack, your handler will execute GWT code to attach to the RootPanel a FlowPanel with embedded HTML text with your help information. This is perceived by the user as a “new page”, which is what he expects when he clicks on a hyperlink. The URL will be something.html/help. Now pretend he returns to this URL via the back button, not your hyperlink. No problem. You don’t care about the hyperlink click. You only care that, somehow, the history stack changes. Your value change handler fires again, and does the same thing as before to display the help panel. The user still enjoys the experience of navigating through web pages, even though you and I know that there is only one web page and that you are attaching and detaching panels to the RootPanel (or whatever scheme you are using to display your GWT panels).

And this leads to a bonus topic.

This bonus is a bit more complicated, but ironically, it could help better understand hyperlinks. I say more complicated, but really, it helps solidify this notion that a GWT application is made up of a series of states, and that the web page on the screen is just the user’s perception of those state changes. And that is Activities and Places. Activities and Places abstracts away this history frame manipulation, handling it in the background once you’ve set up a mapper with a GWT-provided class designed for this purpose, allowing you to break down your app into a series of activities, and as the user interacts through these activities he is put into different places, and each place has a view. Moreover, the user can move from place to place using browser controls like the address bar, bookmarks, history, and the backward/forward buttons, giving the user a real web-like experience. If you really want to get a grip on the conceptual difference between hyperlinks and anchors, you should try to learn this GWT topic. It can really make you change the way you see your apps, and for the better.