Up and running with GWT and Maven 2

I have decided that it was time for me to take a look a Google Web Toolkit. In this post I will share my experiences with setting up my build using Maven 2 (do we really still need to version the maven name? Anybody starting new projects using Maven 1?).

You may see following posts about my GWT experiences as my, in the moment, experimenting application evolves to take over the world...

To start somewhere I found a Maven 2 GWT archetype which I gave a try. I found the archetype through a Google Group so you need to download the archetype from here and build it. Just unzip and run mvn install.

The archetype is designed for use inside Eclipse. My favorite IDE is Intellij IDEA, but never mind the Eclipse files .project, .classpath and a .launch file can just be deleted.

With the magic line(s) beautifully expressed in a non verbose way ;-) I created my project:

mvn archetype:create -DarchetypeGroupId=com.totsp.gwt -DarchetypeArtifactId=gwt-archetype -DarchetypeVersion=1.0-SNAPSHOT -DartifactId=foobar -DgroupId=foo.bar

The archetype in use uploaded the 12. of June references the latest stabile release of GWT version 1.3.3. In the time of writing there is a version 1.4 RC (1.4.10). I updated my pom.xml to point to this new version.

For interaction with GWT through maven I have used the plugin as provided with the archetype maven-googlewebtoolkit2-plugin.

Simply add something like the following to your settings.xml:

<profile>
<id>gwt-1.4.10</id>
<properties>
<google.webtoolkit.home>/usr/local/gwt/gwt-mac-1.4.10</google.webtoolkit.home>
<google.webtoolkit.extrajvmargs>-XstartOnFirstThread</google.webtoolkit.extrajvmargs>
</properties>
</profile>

and remember to activate the profile for your build. This will also let the plugin be aware of where your local GWT installation is. If you are running on Mac OS X, as I am, remember to set -XstartOnFirstThread. Otherwise the GWT browser cannot start.

Having this in place I was able to start my build by running 'mvn gwt:gwt'. This goal runs just after the Maven package phase and will start the GWT browser launching my app.


Thanks to the archetype I was up running in no time. It gives me a head start in how to organize my project structure and has some important initial configurations for the gwt plugin. Of course I have not yet tried the full capabilities (or lacking) of the various goals of the plugin.

I also tried using the maven jetty plugin and this worked for me NOT using the mvn jetty:run, but the mvn jetty:run-exploded goal. Using the run-exploded goal lets maven run the war plugin and Jetty will look in the target folder and not directly in the source folders. Not sure yet why looking directly in the source folders causes some GWT problems, but for now I will just use jetty towards the exploded war in the target folder.

In time I will found out how good my development cycle will be when beginning to actually add code to the application...