Google App Engine/GWT/Eclipse Plugin Newbie Question- how to autobuild client side resources?

Question

Hi there,

I'm tinkering with the default GWT application generated by the Google Eclipse plugin when I click the Google "New Web Application Project" button in Eclipse 3.5. This will no doubt be familiar to many of you.. basically there is an h1 title stating "Web Application Starter Project," a text field, and a Send button.

What I've found is that whenever I make changes to the client side resources, e.g. change the text on the Send button to "Submit" in the .java file, Eclipse does not appear to autobuild these resources. In fact I have to rebuild the entire project in order for these changes to be reflected in my browser. I do have "build automatically" selected in eclipse.

I should state that this is my second GWT project, the first was almost entirely server side (restlet on GAE) and everything built automatically nicely.

When I first tried this new project with updated client resources, on refreshing my browser, the browser stated "you may need to (re)compile your project." I'm not sure if this is relevant but I thought I'd mention it all the same.

So what's going on? How do I get Eclipse/GWT to autobuild these client side resources? Cheers for any help you can offer! :-)

Answer 1

I just installed Eclipse + the GWT SDK/plugins. When I run the default project, install the browser plugin, it shows me a send button. When I change the text "Send" in the .java file to "Submit" and I refresh the browser, it shows me "Submit", in other words: the .java file has been recompiled to javascript, while the server was still running.

It prints the following info, fyi:

I am running Google App Engine Development/1.3.3.1.

It looks like you are using:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100423 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.3

Furthermore, I use Eclipse 3.5 Galileo. So it looks to me that it pretty much does what you want by default. I also tested this in my Windows environment, works the same there.