Hi everyone,
Does anyone know any good articles on how to deploy Google Web Toolkit (GWT) applications to a production environment? What are the requirements? Should I use Tomcat or Jetty with or without Apache? My GWT app leverages GWT-RPC requiring it to be hosted on a JVM stack.
My current experience with deployment to production is primarily based on a Microsoft stack (IIS, ASP.NET etc).
Hope anyone can point me in the right direction,
Thanks.
The requirements would be any J2EE server that complies is Servlet 2.5 standard.
You don't have to install Apache, tomcat have his own web server. GWT would build for you a WAR file you should copy that file to the tomcat webapps and restart tomcat, it would deploy it automaticly. The war file will contain all the needed file.
To build the war file you have to use ant, an article here how to do
I think the ant build would create the war file, anyway zipping the war directory and changing the extension to '.war' is the same (WAR file are only zip files)
GWT is primarily a client side technology. You need to decide what stack you will be developing your back end in. It could be an ASP.NET backend, it could be a simple static deployment of apache, or a full J2EE stack. It depends on what your app will be doing. When all is said and done, a GWT app is just some html and a bunch of javascript. You can serve that part from any web server.
The real question is what backend will that GWT client be talking to. What confuses the issue is that many GWT apps happen to use GWT-RPC, which means they will be written in java and thus require a java backend. But you could just as well write a GWT app that is standalone (ie no server side processing needed) or communicates with a .net app using some kind of web service interface.
You may try InstallAce (installace.com) for deployment if your application is running on Windows paltform.