Nuno Sousa's Corner

In the last entry I showed how to get started with GWT and get a nicer build file with Ant. In this entry I'll explain the process of moving from Ant to Maven. My goal here is to take advantage of all of Maven's features while still maintaining a workable project configuration that I can use from a command line and from Eclipse. GWT's tools generate an Eclipse project but don't do other things like, for instance, adding dependencies to the Eclipse project when you add them to the build file. Maybe you can do this using Apache's Ivy . I haven't tried it, maybe I will someday if I end up hitting a wall using Maven... First thing to do is to rearrange our source code. Maven expects things to be on different paths and we will have to do that. I started by moving all java source code to a newly created "src/main/java". I'm using git so I just did: $ mkdir -p src/main/java $ git mv src/org src/main/java/org I had to do a similar step for the unit tests:...

GWT Start-up: improving the Ant Build file In the past weeks I've been investigation Google's Web Toolkit . I started looking at it because I wanted a good "Web 2.0" application and JSF was cutting it. I tried using JSF and Porlets but Portlets 2.0 isn't ready for prime time yet: the JSF bridges I've tested still don't work, but that is a topic for another post. Today I want to make a fast track introduction to GWT and to summarise some of those issues and how I worked around them. For now I'll start with the basic project setup. GWT has first class support for Apache's Ant but I wanted to use Maven. Why Maven? It simply makes sense to me because of all the Project Management support it has. You can improve Ant with Ivy but for me it still feels like shell scripting in XML. If I'm going to pay the price for XML than I want something in return. There is an archetype for GWT and Maven but I simply don't like it so I decided to start with GW...