Clues on getting started with GWT under Eclipse

After an interesting JavaOne session on GWT, I thought I would have a quick play with the toolkit. I hit a little roadblock initially which after discussions with other colleagues they had problems with too.

In the Getting Started guide the section on building an Eclipse project skips one step that caught me out. Do not create the project in your Eclipse workspace, instead perform the two steps in a temporary area. Then import that temporary project using Eclipse/import/Existing files into workspace - be sure to click the copy source.

I found if I didn’t do that I get errors about the project I was trying to import being already inside the workspace.

My first impressions of the toolkit are that it is excellent. This all looks much easier than supporting a big ball of JavaScript, and some of the 1.4 features described in the JavaOne talk really seemed to have been well thought out. In particular the idea of combining many small graphics into one large and clipping for view(automatically) will cut down lots of http requests and speed up application start.