GWT mortgage calculator - step by step conclusion

[Anthony]

Howdy again from Colorado,

We have the final version of our GWT mortgage calculator up and running
and documented. We've added a tabbed interface for advanced calculator
options in this version. You can see it running live on the Colorado
HomeFinder website:
http://www.cohomefinder.com/Colorado-mortgage.htm

We've also integrated the mortgage calculator into each of our MLS
listing pages where it pulls the property price, taxes and HOA fees
from the database and pre-populates those fields. You can see an
example of this in this first link (easy monthly payments of only
$23,000!). For future readers, if this house sells click through to
the mortgage payment on any property in the second link:
http://www.cohomefinder.com/p/80206/244058-6.chf
http://www.cohomefinder.com/browse-ci-Colorado-luxury-homes.htm

Again, we are providing source and documentation for the interesting
bits, now up to three increasingly complex versions:
http://www.mooreds.com/files/mtgcalc-v1.tar.gz
http://www.mooreds.com/files/mtgcalc-v2.tar.gz
http://www.mooreds.com/files/mtgcalc-v3.tar.gz

Dan Moore has done a super job of coding this and documenting it on his
blog. Here are links to posts with all the steps:

Step by Step: A Mortgage Calculator using GWT
http://www.mooreds.com/weblog/archives/000348.html

Step #1: A Calculator with No Server Interaction
http://www.mooreds.com/weblog/archives/000349.html

Step #2: A Calculator which retrieves data from a Java server process
http://www.mooreds.com/weblog/archives/000351.html

Step #2a Creating the Server side components
http://www.mooreds.com/weblog/archives/000352.html

Step #2b: Updating the GWT Client to communicate with the Server
http://www.mooreds.com/weblog/archives/000353.html

Step #3: Add a tabbed interface and other enhancements
http://www.mooreds.com/weblog/archives/000354.html

GWT Mortgage Calculator Conclusion
http://www.mooreds.com/weblog/archives/000355.html

In his last post Dan has some final thoughts about the strengths and
weaknesses of GWT. I'll post my own review in this group shortly as
well. I hope everyone has enjoyed our public GWT adventure as much as
we have.

--
Anthony
Colorado HomeFinder
www.COhomefinder.com

[Kay]

Thanks for the tutorial and sharing the code.
I hope this would encourage other experts to contribute with their own
tutorials / documentation.
One feels Google could have done a better job with the samples and
documentation.

[bjorn]

Kay, I don't know what you think is missing in the GWT documentation, I
think the GWT team has done a great job documenting the GWT Beta
release:

+ how to download, install and run the examples
+ important principles (async communication, hosted/scripted mode)
+ farily good API docs (has been subject to some discussion in the
forum, will be interesting to see what comes out of that)
+ real examples spanning from a very simple app (hello world) to
demonstrations of most of the widget set (kitchen sink) and some more
advanced concepts (requesting data from a server in the DynaTable and
the JSON parsing example).

It is great that Anthony is willing to publish his hands-on
experiences. I guess he relies on the GWT documentation covering "the
basics" so that he can concentrate on documenting how to implement
concrete use cases using GWT.

Björn

[Anthony]

You are very welcome. Given GWT is open source AND beta the GWT
documentation is a off to a great start. My motivation in calling out
the documentation is to encourage Google to continuously improve the
core GWT documentation under their control and to encourage the open
source community growing around GWT to create examples, tutorials,
articles, ect.

This is why we've created our mortgage calculator example. Our example
is what I wish we had available getting started w/GWT for our
particular needs. I hope others will do the same, as everyone has
different needs. If there are a dozen or so examples like ours
available it will be much easier for other folks to hit the ground
running with GWT.

I suspect a year from now GWT will have better documentation than most
AJAX frameworks. It really depends on what happens between now and
then.

[jlu...@gmail.com]

Hi,
Dan mentioned as a weakness the inability for GWT apps to allow search
engines's indexing of a web site build using GWT.

Is this really true ?

I realize all the stuff is in javascript but is there no way to make
this happen ? Maybe a hack that spits out into the meta-tag all of the
text content generated ?

thanks for your thoughts and sharing your experience.

[Anthony]

jlukar,

Yes, my understanding is a search engine won't be able to index the
parts of a website built with GWT. This is an issue in general with
Javascript and AJAX that is not unique to GWT.

Maybe one of the folks from Google could chime in on this subject
seeing how they, em, work for a big search engine :-)

I was told a good way to see a website the way a search engine does is
to turn off Javascript in your browser. So, looking at our mortgage
calculator example without Javascript:
http://www.cohomefinder.com/Colorado-mortgage.htm

All the HTML content is there but the mortgage calculator on the right
is missing. Looks bad, we really should display a message "please turn
on javascript..." The good news is the other content on this page
should be indexed by search engines. Ah! Let's see by looking at
Google's cache of this page:
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A//www.cohomefinder.com/Colorado-mortgage.htm

Yep, it looks the same as looking at it with javascript turned off in
my browser.

I don't know of any hack around this. Maybe the Google team has a
suggestion?

[Ed Burnette]

Excellent job, both with the sample app and with all the explanation of
how it was created.