Simple GWTP and Objectify example with Maven

General, , , ,

I’ve been playing with GWTP (an MVP framework for GWT) and Google’s AppEngine (via Objectify). I prefer to use the Maven build system. So I created a simple small example that does this: murrayc-gwtp-appengine-example. Improvements are very welcome. I’d like to learn how the code should be improved.

In case it’s interesting to anyone, here’s why I wanted this little example to exist:

GWT

The official GWT website’s equivalent StockWatcher example/documentation does not demonstrate best practices. It:

There is official GWT sample code that uses maven and Objectify, but it’s all mixed up with other stuff and I wanted something much simpler.

There is also an official GWT MVP example from 2010 hidden away, but it’s not in git and I didn’t even find it until I started writing this.

Objectify

Objectify’s documentation seems pretty good now that I look at it again, though I struggled at first. I think Google (and StackExchange) kept taking me to example code that used one of the various older versions of the API.

Oddly, Objectify’s documentation suggests that you use objectify-gwt with GWT. but objectify-gwt doesn’t seem to have any documentation and I didn’t seem to need it myself.

GWTP

The official GWTP website’s documentation is rather scattered, with several simple typos that make its example code snippets inconsistent with each other. The documentation seems to have been restructured from some other source. For instance, several internal links don’t take you to what is apparently intended. Some internal links take you to the page itself.  Lots of the best documentation is spread across their blog posts, but not brought together properly. They do at least show use of maven in their beginner’s GWTP example. but that example code itself is not in version control as a real project. GWTP is a nice clean API that deserves better.

Of course, it is incredibly hard to describe source code in documentation and keep that documentation and source code up to date and in sync. It needs a system. It never works if you just put the source code inline where no compiler can touch it. Although it’s nice to show source code inline (ideally taken automatically from a real source file), you also need links to the real source code so people can see the latest version.