I'd like to allow our web developers to continue to work in pure HTML and to let developers to write GWT Java-only code to write the rest of the business logic.
Is it even possible?
Have anyone tried to work with the web developers in the GWT environment?
How do you incorporate the web developers into the GWT development process?
If by HTML, you simply mean the layout and styling (not the content of the widgets themselves), then yes, I would say that this is completely possible.
GWT makes it fairly easy to seemlessly combine HTML code (with its own IDs, classes, and associated CSS) with GWT widgets. Many of the GWT widgets themselves are fairly thin wrappers over normal HTML controls, and can therefore be styled easily themselves.
Essentially, the webdevelopers give you the HTML/CSS files, and you make sure that the interactive parts have ids on them. Then your Java GWT code calls RootPanel.get() with these ids and adds the interactive content.
Its hard to be more specific about what is and isn't possible with this approach without seeing more of your specific requirements.
Essentially what I'm looking for is something like either DeclarativeUI (http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit/wiki/DeclarativeUi) or UIBinder (http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit-incubator/wiki/UiBinder).
According to the GWT Blog the UIBinder just moved to incubator stage and will not be available by GWT 1.6 timeframe, but much later.
Is there any other way at this moment?