GWT in production

[Al]

Hi,

I am considering using GWT in my website. I am concerned about the
problems that may arise when deploying the final application to the web
hosting company. There seems to be a lot of posts about configuring GWT
to run with an external tomcat server, with modification required to
GWT jar files etc. This seems to be quite messy and problematic. i
don't to discover at deploy time that GWT was not suitable.

i would be interested to hear people's experience with this.

thanks,

[Jason Essington]

As far as deployment goes, there isn't really a problem with using
GWT in production.

the gwt-user.jar does include some bits that you don't want to deploy
(javax package, and source files), but that issue is on google's radar:
http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/issues/4794724.html

This is really only a problem if you are deploying into a servlet
container though.
I use ant to compile my application, so it is a simple matter to
create a gwt-deploy.jar that only includes the gwt class files.
<!-- Repackage the gwt-user.jar file so that it is deployable -->
<!-- we remove the source files, and everything in the javax
package -->
<!-- this jar (gwt-deploy.jar) will be placed in the war file -->
<jar destfile="${package.dir}/gwt-deploy.jar">
<zipfileset src="${lib.dir}/gwt-user.jar">
<exclude name="javax/**" />
<exclude name="META-INF/**" />
<exclude name="**/*.java" />
</zipfileset>
</jar>

when taken with the rest of my build.xml I get a .war file that I can
just drop in any servlet container without any trouble at all.

-jason