Book Review: Ext GWT 2.0 Beginner's Guide Book
Book Review: Ext GWT 2.0 Beginner's Guide Book
Review on the book: Ext-GWT Beginners guide
I love the Ext-GWT framework, only not their license but do understand it. I used it a lot in the time it was called mygwt and you could find me often in their forum. It's a professional well-designed framework.
I like the way the book is setup: clear and structured. It begins by explaining why you should use GXT (short for Ext-GWT) and continues by describing the basics like the fundamental classes like the Container, and fundamental actions like the lazy rendering.
It's important to have a good understanding of these topics when you begin using GXT.
The rest of the book is mainly a Reference guide that explains GXT topics through an RSS example.
I was a disappointed to conclude that it's (also) mainly a referenced guide, especially after a good start in the book.
A few things that I miss:
Why not to use GXT? I am sure GXT has disadvantages which are missing.
How extendable is GXT? For example: if I need more detailed validation of a Textbox field, how do I implement this?.. Not discussed at all.
The advice and experience of the author? I guess he has used GXT a lot so why not share this with the readers? I find that very important.
The above points are important for a "Ext-GWT Beginners" book as beginners are looking for good advice to overcome the mistakes experience GXT developers made and want to make sure they don't create a lock-in situation, such that they can't extend the GXT functionality when needed. These are nightmare situations for a beginner and something he wants to overcome. A book containing this information is worth the money and many beginners will buy this for sure (like the Hibernate Java Persistency book)
A Reference book has little added value and you can find this on the internet.
Other topics that I miss:
The book briefly mentions the observer pattern, but nothing about his usage in a Javascript environments and the risks of not having weak listeners (SoftReference) like can be used in Swing.
Why?: Many beginners start with a global data model with observers that easily lead to memory leaks as the listeners are never removed.
And how do we solve this? (I push events in these situations rather the pulling them and don't allow observers on global models)
What about the "new" hot features of GWT, like resource bundles, code Spliting, UiBinder, Data presentation widgets. I understand that these are GWT core features and this is a book about GXT, but still, at least describe them briefly and reference to the website..And compare them to the alternatives of GXT (like the GXT templating). Especially compare it with GXT as it still uses a very large CSS file which is a bit old-fashion if you look at CssResource usage.
And Enterprise usage? How to use it in an existing environment with Maven. Or how to use it in a two layered deployment model (with noserver mode), such that a Http webserver serves all GWT javascript files and a Webcontainer all business calls.
At least give a beginner some pointers in the correct direction as otherwise they will "invent" it them self and will go through the same mistakes as advanced GXT developers had.
The book describes some outdated topics like the Register and MVC usage.
Currently there a nice/better alternatives like GUICE for injecting your beans instead of using a Register.
There is a lot of fuze around the MVP pattern, instead the book refers only to the old outdated MVC pattern.
I wouldn't advice beginners to use this pattern (I used GXT MVC a lot) and has some serious drawbacks and performance issues when used in a enterprise environment.
Example: in the book they attach the View to the bus (Dispatcher). This leads to memory leaks if the View is removed and it's not correctly removed from the Bus. And believe: this is easily forgotten.
I would love to see that the book describes these issues and also compare the GXT MVC with the current MVP projects out there.
As a side note: I use MVCP: Only the Controller is connected to the bus and will take care of all business logic like backend calls. The presenter contains all presentation logic. All are connected through interfaces which results in a good performance (attaching the View to Bus can lead to a poor performance when all key events are forwarded to the controller).
What's about HTML5 issues and future support.
And why describe Gears when this is outdated?
Conclusion: Disappointing, missing details and advice/experience of advanced GXT developers.
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