Comments on: GWT IDE Selection

By: widi raspito

widi raspito — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 10:28:15 +0000

i love netbeans, and i like eclipse, both is perfect

By: John

John — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 02:44:57 +0000

Instantiations GWT Designer for Eclipse does these renames properly. Its seriously great in my book, highly recommended.

By: Hossein

Hossein — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 00:26:10 +0000

I’m looking for an IDE with as few as possible issues to integrate with GWT. I think Eclipse is the best choice. NetBeans is great but the directory structure is not match with GWT, so it’s out. I didn’t test IDEA ever, but it seems hasn’t full support of GWT (according to other comments).

The thing is just annoying me a bit, is that some folks noted they using Eclipse for simple projects. I don’t know why, but I think that’s a personal reason, not a technical one.

By: ChrisM

ChrisM — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:44:26 +0000

@Siegfried Why wouldn’t you recommend eclipse for more complex GWT apps?

By: Siegfried

Siegfried — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 11:17:29 +0000

I have done the same like you Eric, but i am not sure which IDE is the best for working with GWT. For Project generation i recommend to use the gwt-batch-file, after that the generated eclipse project can be imported into Eclipse, NetBeans or IDEA.

NetBeans and IDEA are having massive problems generating a correct GWT-Project. At IDEA there is the build-file missing and NetBeans produce a build-file with its own target-structure (could be confusing for GWT-Beginners). Some other points where the IDE’s are similar, are the code inspections and support for editing and creating GWT relevant files.

If you have a simple GWT-Project i would recommend Eclipse, for more complex GWT apps – using Spring, Hibernate … – i would recommend IDEA (good refactoring, inspections..) or if you don’t want to pay money – take a lookt at NetBeans.

By: Smitty

Smitty — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 02:46:12 +0000

@Eric, finally a good discussion about different IDEs that didn’t turn into a full blown mud-slinging, “My IDE’s dad can beat up your IDE’s dad,” Waste of time. Perhaps I should congratulate your posters as well. This is good stuff, thanks!

By: Olivier Gérardin

Olivier Gérardin — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 09:10:22 +0000

I’m currently using IDEA 8.1 (customer’s choice, not mine). I found a problem with the way it handles the sync between the service interface and the async interface: it insists on having methods in the async interface return void, while this is in no way required by GWT. Methods in the async interface can return anything you like, and it can be pretty handy sometimes (we use this in this project to return a RequestBuilder). IDEA generates a bunch of warnings “asynchronous remote service doesn’t define corresponding method”, which is not correct. Also, the only fix that is offered for this warning is “synchronize all methods”, which effectively recreates the async interface… with all methods returning void! So we can’t rely on IDEA to maintain the sync.

By: Niel

Niel — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 20:29:42 +0000

@Eric FYI…I wasn’t criticizing. Sorry if it was taken that way. You blog post kicked off an interesting discussion, and I was just adding my $.02.

By: Eric Burke

Eric Burke — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 03:18:31 +0000

@Niel thanks for telling me what I shouldn’t do. As I stated very clearly:

“I looked just deep enough to satisfy my own curiosity and to choose a tool for my own coding.”

By: Niel

Niel — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 03:04:53 +0000

You evaluation GWT IDE’s shouldn’t be based entirely on GWT support. The primary reason I picked Google Plugin for Eclipse was because it’s an Eclipse plugin. I have a bunch of other plugins in Eclipse to support my GWT development, including Spring, JPA, and DWR. Even if the Google plugin isn’t perfect, I won’t switch IDEs.