At the Sun JavaOne conference in 2006, where GWT was first showcased, the lights immediately went on. I was in attendance, and I instantly understood, as did many others, what GWT creators Bruce Johnson and Joel Webber were showing the world. GWT was something different. It was not just another web framework at a Java conference but a new approach. An approach that embraced the treatment of JavaScript in the browser as the “assembly language” of the web, as Arno Puder of the XML11 project once put it, and that did so by starting from Java, in order to iron out some of the terrain of the browser landscape.

I was excited about leveraging this new technology in the real world, and I brought it back to the company I worked for, where my longtime friend Charlie Collins also worked. There, in Atlanta, Georgia, where the GWT team is also based, we started cranking away on several GWT applications, some tools to help support our development (such as GWT-Maven), and a framework approach to using GWT. Along the way, we got involved in the GWT community on the project-issue tracker and discussion boards, we pondered GWT at JUG meetings, and we discussed some of the finer points with the GWT team on a few special occasions.

Early on, I posted a series of articles about GWT online that became rather popular. That response, coupled with our practical knowledge of GWT and of web application design in general (having been involved in that field since the Servlet API itself arrived), led us to think that the time was right for a hands-on GWT “how to” book. We took the concept to several book publishers and decided that Manning was right for the project based on our general fondness for their books and the fact that they had a new “in Practice” series that they thought would be a perfect fit for our proposal.

The rest is history, as they say. A lot of long nights and weekends, and close to two years later, GWT in Practice is an actual book! The experience we have with GWT, which is captured in the book, will be helpful whether you are new to GWT or you have already used GWT and are seeking some problem-solving advice. We hope this book will help you find the same kind of success we have had in creating impressive and successful web applications using GWT.

ROBERT COOPER