Just Me said
As I completely disagree with rating 1 out of 5 I re-post my review from Amazon dot ca.
And yes - it's not a step by step tutorial on GWT but more a collection of very real problems and their solutions that you would encounter in any real-life GWT project. I'm by no means an expert in GWT and that's why I really appreciate numerous tips and ideas found in the book. Below is the review from Amazon dot ca:
"I'd like to thank Mr.Kereki for the effort he put into publishing this book. It's surprising how few recent books are available on the subject. The book covers the whole GWT application life cycle from start to end and as such is very practical. I wish this book was bigger covering even more topics and reflecting the most recent advances in GWT. Still it was interesting reading about MVP, GWT testing, performance optimization.
This book does cover GWT 2.0 stuff to some degree, but the coverage is rather limited. Also there is no single word about Google app engine integration (which is obviously not related directly to GWT but nevertheless is often used as a complimentary technology and is rather hot currently).
In the light of the latest events (GWT 2.1 and Roo introduction, Google Wave sudden death, Oracle-Google Java lawsuit, HTML 5 standardization) it's really hard to guess technology direction, it may abruptly change without any notice. Still I personally see this technology as a very potent one (kudos to Google team making such a gem) and try to use it while it's still available.
If you develop with GWT technology, buy this book, you would not be disappointed, it's very useful and practical."
R. Staats said
I found this book to be exactly what I needed. I was new to GWT and Java but a long time .NET and C programmer. I needed to build a portal with GWT. I had finished the nice tutorial of a Stock Watcher app on the GWT tutorial site and then was left with OK, how do I go about this now for the full fledged app? After a few false starts and reading other peoples source code I came across this book. It was perfect.
I had read through quite a lot of other GWT books and my biggest gripe is that they are horribly out of date. GWT has many changes with the 2.X code releases and books written to the old 1.X versions just didn't hold up. This book gave me everything I could ask for:
1) Relevant to GWT 2.x
2) MVP design pattern. I was ready to move from MVC to MVP and this book used the MVP design pattern.
3) I needed to design a secure portal. This book delivers that example.
I am sure in this brief review I am missing many other good points but I found this book to be worth its weight in gold for a practical design example for someone wanting to go beyond a Hello World application in GWT.
The one thing I recommend is that if you get the book then you should also obtain a copy of the source code. I did find sections of the book that were a bit hard for me to tie together but with the source code and the book side by side it was very easy to understand. In my opinion this book is not for someone who wants a linear experience of reading how to learn GWT programming step by step but is more geared to someone who already has basic GWT experience and now wants to proceed with building an actual useful application.
Ed said
This book has no concept of learning by walking through samples that get progressively more complex. The author has a final application in mind, and every sample is an explanation on this one concept.
Most provided samples cannot be run until you are very deep into the book because the rest of the code has not been provided.
Although there are some interesting concepts peppered throughout the book, it is difficult to see how this book got past the editing phase.
Sam Alexander said
I bought this book because it was the only new book I could find out there using the Model View Presenter pattern for GWT aside from the google tutorials. The author confused the heck out of me! He shows snippets of code from his sample application (he's got 5 versions of the app all in ONE project!) to explain concepts and adds his techniques to it. But I couldn't focus on his writing because there was no "road map" or something for me that I can grasp which made reading this book very, very frustrating. Like the other reviewers have said, he jumps all over the place. I think the book would have been much better if he had taken a step by step (iterative) approach in building his app and explaining the concepts and his own techniques pertaining to only what he would have built so far. Actually, come to think of it..to me it was like a bunch of blog articles on various topics of GWT were just compiled together into a book. I was disappointed as a person trying to get some in depth knowledge of using GWT. Therefore, the google tutorials on GWT unfortunately will be the only source of GWT MVP that I can refer to at this point. If anyone knows of another GWT book that uses MVP...please respond to my comment.
Gary Murphy said
This is a very disorganized book. I am in Chapter 4, but I still haven't seen a basic GWT application or had the architectural concepts explained. We have, however, seen code generators, deferred binding and other advanced concepts. What a mess. This book jumps around more than a 1970s BASIC program.
The author seems more intent on sharing his knowledge of arcane details than he is on tutoring programmers on how to use GWT. I am an advanced developer, and I am not getting much out of this, so it's time to explore other GWT resources. It's a shame because I sense the author does know the materials - he's just not a writer.
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