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3708

answers:

4

Haven't seen anything about it here but it seems to solve one of the problems with GWT - the fact that you have to write Java code to generate your GUI. Instead this software allows you to design the GUI using drag-and-drop tools - a WYSIWYG interface.

I'm not trying to sell the product, by the way.

I just want to know whether it works as advertised, is effective, easy to use, etc?

Anyone have any experience to answer these questions?

+3  A: 

I don't think that the lack of a GUI editor is a problem with GWT. Consider HTML, there are plenty of WYSIWYG editors for that (like Dreamweaver) but most experienced web designers don't touch that stuff with a barge pole, they hand code it. Not because they're masochists, but because they want control over the source, they want to make it clean and readable. Coding is a scientific artwork, best left to Human Beings ;)

I tried GWT Designer very early on, and I found that it was fairly poor (and only worked on Windows because it had some dlls that went along with it), but things may have changed drastically since then.

rustyshelf
HTML is a markup language - big difference between that and writing Java code to generate your presentation layer, right?
Hola
Thanks for the feedback.
Hola
Yes HTML is a markup language. I guess you can substitute Swing or Objective-C in there instead. People generally don't use GUI builders to build Swing apps, and most Xcode programmers don't use Interface Builder to build UIs. It's just easier to understand it, an then hand code it.
rustyshelf
GWT development allows wrapping HTML to some extent, but doesn't seem to strongly support it. rustyshelf, have you actually designed HTML that you use with GWT? Do you wrap? How do you bind data and validation to those fields? By hand in Java?
dfrankow
A: 

GWT-Designer is getting better all the time. Give it another look some time, it's catching up to things like visual studio in my opinion.

sweeney
+1  A: 

I've tried GWT Designer recently. Still looks poor. If you don't want to loose flexibility I would recommend to use GWTLab

A: 

I had a year's subscription but did not renew it, being a bit disappointed with the product.

1) The designer injects all Java code adding creation/property setting/event handling to the module you are building in a most unecomic way. Additionally, it is pretty difficult to modularize the application. Compared to Flex, for instance, the number of lines of code gets easily double or triple in a module and seeing the forest from the trees is not easy.

2) Web applications I built only a a couple of years ago CEASED WORKING possibly due to changes in Javascript engines. That was something I did not expect and is very possibly GWT's fault.

3) The GUI designer needs A LOT of CPU power and so does the build phase.

The concept is nice, however, I admit and GWT designer is the only of its kind. The feeling of difficulty in modularizing may well be my lazyness.

karvonen