Demonstration of gwtClassRun
After weeks of development and preparation in the midst of other commitments, 
gwtClassRun 
, as a side project, is finally released in beta. The work begin on 24 April 2008 after around the week I suggest a proposal entitled Improving the development experience of Google Web Toolkit to propose a better way of building GWT application by making it easy to run a EntryPoint class so as not to consume too much time testing unnecessary integration. This is particular relevant as the compilation and execution times increase as GWT application becomes larger subsequently. So to manage the expectation, it might not be feasible to continue to rely on GWT team to improve the performance because each version of GWT takes few months for improved releases. Thus a viable option is to break GWT application down in each testable class that faster to test and perform integrated testing when necessary.
The proposal suggests that a “executable” GWT class is identified with its own main method similarly to a normal Java class that executed by a JVM. This required a standard method call that support across IDEs and the probability of such support is slim as it requires too much too work to gain such rapport. Before this, the use of EntryPoint is considered as a replacement for main method however GWT supports multiple EntryPoints , and there is a possibility for developers to depend on the order of EntryPoints for Initialization, and probably end up creating more problems than it solves. AFter playing around with gwt.xml descriptor file and understand it better, I figure that it just be easier and more effective to make use of EntryPoint tag so as not to introduce complication and unnecessary changes to GWT’s way of working, and maybe that’s what GWT team is thinking all this while.
After weeks of experimentation, development and testing, gwtClassRun is done as bug free as possible. The initial platform is Windows, and if reception is good, likely to port to other platform like MacOS and Linux. Since this application is written in pure Java without using any native OS call, the port shall not impose too much change. What is more problematic is probably file and directory handling. Anyway, gwtClassRun is officially released as beta test today and just have to wait and see how other GWT developers respond to it. In the mean time, I will take a good rest to day-dream and continue further work on other remaining projects that will be released in GeekyWare.
