grack.com

We’ve been trying out Google’s Eclipse plugin for the last week and it’s made a huge difference to our GWT development experience.  The plugin is designed to enhance your Java AppEngine and GWT workflow.  We’re mainly using it for GWT development, so the biggest wins for us are the GWT features, including:

  • Auto-completion and error checking for JSNI.  JSNI is a powerful, yet horribly complex beast to work with.  With the plugin, it becomes almost as simple as working with Java code.
  • Automatic management of GWT jar references.  This is a big help for cross-platform development, as each platform needs its own, specific jar (gwt-dev-linux, gwt-dev-mac, gwt-dev-windows, etc.).
  • Automatic provisioning of run targets with appropriate runtime classpath entries.  GWT requires you to ensure all your translatable Java source directories are available on the classpath.  Each of the run targets you create is pre-populated with this information from referenced projects, saving you the step of manually managing them (or hacking them into your project’s global classpath).
  • Support for running a unit test as a “GWT unit test”.  This lets you launch a GWT-enhanced unit test in either hosted or web mode.
  • Right-click/run for any module in your GWT project, replacing custom .launch files previously required for each module.
  • Wizards to create common GWT components: modules, entry points and GWT-enhanced HTML files.

There’s some cool support for AppEngine in the plugin as well.  You can publish a hybrid GWT/AppEngine project to Google’s servers with a couple of clicks.  This makes the development/deploy cycle trivial, allowing you to quickly iterate using the same environment as your production applications.  With this new toolset, AppEngine is an easier platform to deploy to than servers you own and operate yourself, IMHO.

Aside: one interesting feature that slipped under the radar for this AppEngine release is support for cron-style jobs.  While this was possible using a cron job on a managed server hitting a URL on your application instance, implementing it in the platform itself makes life easier for web developers.  Note that this isn’t true cron, but rather a “hit this URL on this schedule” feature.  I actually prefer having cron jobs exposed as web endpoints - it saves you from having to duplicate your web framework’s infrastructure setup in a command-line application.

All-in-all, a very cool release.  Thanks to the GWT and AppEngine teams for making this a reality.

Read full post