This post is part of the “ITworks Design Journal” series.
We currently use an enterprise-level application for managing work orders, and an in-house web site for managing assets. After sitting down and looking at these two systems, we came to the conclusions that (1) the work order system was more powerful than we needed, and we were likely paying too much for it, and (2) the asset system was too simple and difficult-to-use (very form-based layout). It didn’t take long to decide the following:
- I wanted the new app to be web based, allowing for use anywhere without installation
- I wanted the new app to use a rich web UI
- I wanted the new app to be exactly as complex as we needed it to be, but no more
- I wanted the new app to be expandable as easily as possible
As the IT sat down and began to brainstorm what features we wanted the app to have, I started thinking about languages and frameworks. PHP has always been my favorite server-side language, and the only web UI framework I had used to any extent was the Yahoo! UI library.
After some research, I discovered the Google Web Toolkit, or GWT. I had actually heard of it before, but passed it up as I didn’t read enough about it to fully understand what it was. It didn’t take me long to find the following on thier site:
With Google Web Toolkit (GWT), you write your AJAX front-end in the Java programming language which GWT then cross-compiles into optimized JavaScript that automatically works across all major browsers.
The very idea intrigued me; I downloaded the toolkit and installed Eclipse (I haven’t written Java in a very long time), and started following along with the sample tutorial.
In the end, I was very impressed with GWT. The ability to debug a web application just like you would a Java application (after all, in the GWT shell, it is technically a Java application!) was a huge boon, and being able to make a change in the Java code and simply refresh the included hosted-mode browser to see the change saved so much time.
The one thing I didn’t like about GWT was the look and feel. What “widgets” it does include are very HTML-ish and don’t feel rich at all. So, some more searching, and I discover Ext JS, a javascript UI library that looks very nice. A little more time spent looking around their site revealed an amazing and very cool piece of information–they have a version of their UI library designed specifically to work with GWT!
After downloading and installing the GXT library, I was sold. The UI was beautiful, and between GWT and GXT, Ajax data loading and display is a breeze.
My decision was made: GWT/GXT would be my front end framework of choice; I decided on PHP for the server-side layer, as it is my favorite server-side scripting language and I am very familiar with it. It was time to write some code.