GWT and IntelliJ IDEA as a single, unified product

[Craig Mitchell]

Previously, I was using the free IntelliJ Community Edition.  However, now IntelliJ IDEA is a single, unified product (with an upgrade option to Ultimate).

Before, with the Community Edition, there was no GWT plugin available.  Now I see these:

I also see JavaScript debugger plugins that never showed up before.

Do people use these?  Any other plugins recommended for GWT?

[Jens]

I use IntelliJ Ultimate and thus also using the GWT plugin. I don't use it to run GWT but instead use it for the enhanced code navigation, error checks, auto completion, etc.. But as far as I know you can only use it if you pay for Ultimate. However Jetbrains said in an issue that supporting the GWT plugin isn't priority anymore and they consider making it open source. I guess they have some metrics and the GWT plugin isn't used often enough these days.

The JS debugger is ok, basically what you have in Chrome you then have in IntelliJ. I used it a few times but it annoyed me to always switch between browser and IDE if you put some breakpoints here and there and have to trigger them using the app UI in the browser. If I remember correctly the main benefit from debugging via IntelliJ was that you could navigate code more easily and thus peek at method implementations without actually entering them with the debugger. In the browser you cannot "click into" a method implementation while debugging as you only see a sourcemapped version of the original Java code.

-- J.

[Khun Yee Fung]

I use the GWT plugin to run my GWT projects all the time. It is useful for me because if I need to modify the client side code that is not used by the server side, I can simply modify it and then refresh the browser to get the up-to-date client code. This is especially nice when I am adjusting the CSS and the look-and-feel. To get the CSS automatically refreshed, it has to be injected somehow (I use StyleInjector.inject(), very nice to switch to light/dark mode and back with CSS variables). It can't be in a file. If it is in a file, then both jetty and GWT have to be re-run to get any changes in the CSS file. I guess the CSS file is considered to be on the server side, served by jetty.

I also use the Jetty plugin to run the server side. Together, I can run my GWT projects inside Intellij.

If you are interested, I have an article on Medium on how to run the whole thing with jetty 12.0 (https://medium.com/programming-is-life/how-to-run-jetty-12-and-gwt-inside-intellij-4a5e134bc397).

I don't use the JS debugger.

[Craig Mitchell]

Thanks Khun.  That looks way too hard!  I think I'll stick with GWT Maven Plugin.  🙂

Turns out, the IntelliJ GWT plugin installs, but once I go back to see what's happening, I see this:

So, IntelliJ actually isn't letting me use it.   IntelliJ really should filter it out when searching, or at least say it won't work.