Starting with GWT: Creating a site similar to chucknorrisfacts.com

Question

I want to learn GWT.

I have done the tutorial and now I want to create a complete website. My idea is to create a small mock site like http://www.chucknorrisfacts.com/.

My doubts are:

• How should I do the facts list? Should it be ListView?
• How should I do the pagination? Does smartgwt help me with the pagination code?
• Would you recommend to do the layout in HTML or I should do everything from my java code.

Answer 1

If you want to learn about the nuts and bolts of GWT, you might want to avoid SmartGWT. SmartGWT is insanely powerful and quite polished but you probably won't learn much about what's going on behind the scenes since it'll handle most of the tricky parts like the remote pagination for you. If you ever need to do a real project with GWT though, it's most definitely worth considering.

Do as much of the layout in UIBinder + CSS as possible. Don't do any layout in code unless you absolutely have to. It will save you oh so many headaches.