GWT Books/Tutorial for GWT 1.4 --> 1.7

Question

I'm taking over a colleague's GWT project soon and I've never coded in it before. However as I come from a Java background, I'm sure I won't be banging my head too much or be too overwhelmed when I open Eclipse!

What would be the best book to pick up, or tutorial to go through?

What particular packages / tricks do you recommend I look at first?

Do you wish you had of known about something when you first started in it?

EDIT:

The original code is written in 1.4. I'll be updating it to 1.7, among other things. Which leads me to an additional question: Is there any significant updates I should pay particular attention to?

Answer 1

As far as books go, I haven't seen any good ones that are current. The "current" bit is important. There are books going back to 2007 but they'll be dealing with older versions of GWT. I only started using it at 1.5 but even that was quite different to 1.4. 1.7 now has a relatively free directory structure whereas it was mandated in certainly 1.5 and I think 1.6, among many other differences.

I'd suggest using Google's tutorial as a starting point as that also includes setting it up in Eclipse, which is what you'll be doing.

You will also find that there are people working on GWT 2.0 projects already. This isn't officially released but it is being used (by Google Wave for example). They're basically pulling this down off the trunk in Subversion. There is even less information about this but I'd take a look at the Google I/O presentations if you want to go down this route.

Also, Matt Raible's blog is an excellent resource on GWT issues.