Dead end: GWT + Spiffy

[armida....@gmail.com]

Hi,

Just read some comments on Stackoverflow regarding including Spiffy into existing GWT projects (see below). After more 'testing' of Spiffy with a simple GWT project, it seems that Spiffy cannot be added to GWT in any easy way, and is not designed so that it can be added to GWT. The instructions that Zack provides are in that sense misleading, and wastes people's time trying to add Spiffy to GWT.  A lot of time, just running ant on Spiffy took more than two hours! And then it fell at the first hurdle, for example, this code will not work in GWT <private static final SpiffyUiHtml STRINGS = (SpiffyUiHtml) GWT.create(SpiffyUiHtml.class);> and there is no documentation to show how it would. Did I say "no documentation"? Apparently everyone needs to read "the source". sigh ...

As an aside, it seems a lot of hot-shot developers currently have slobbering love affairs with Ant and Maven, and expect everyone else to share that love. Expecting people to port GWT projects into the Spiffy Ant/Maven environment seems to be an example of this kind of love affair. Well, that's fine, whatever gets you off, but don't tell people that it is easy to simply plugin Spiffy into GWT when it is not, don't waste people's time and don't bs them!

Bye.

_comments_ ... Well Spiffy looks rather spiffy, but what would be even more spiffy would be if you (Zack) would give explicit instructions on how to add spiffy to an existing GWT build process the way it is generated by the Google GWT project creator wizard, rather than only providing me with a wizard that generates a whole new build process when I may not want that. I followed the instructions on your page and while building may be working, I need devmode to also be working. –  Daniel Ok, so I just found the Spiffy UI page on devmode: spiffyui.org/?hostedMode ; however it just says "Use Eclipse"; I do not want to use Eclipse, I want to use emacs and command-line tools; how do I do that? –  Daniel Jan 23 '12 at 0:32 The short version of this thread is that Spiffy UI is set up for its own project management configuration and does not work as a drop-in modification for an existing vanilla GWT project as generated by the GWT project generator. As far as I can tell, this means that to use it I'm going to have to (1) generate a Spiffy UI project, and then (2) port my entire project into that. This is a big risk, as it makes it hard to turn Spiffy UI off again if I don't like it. I think this is a mistake in the way you have Spiffy UI set up: it should be "humble" and allow easily for other build systems. _ end comments_

[Zack Grossbart]

Hello Armida,

Thank you for taking a look at Spiffy UI. I'm sorry it didn't meet your needs. It is possible, and not too hard, to integrate Spiffy UI with an existing GWT project. We've done it many times. It's also possible to use Spiffy UI without Maven or Ant, but it takes some extra work.

GWT also supports a dev mode outside of Eclipse, but it's never been the preferred way to debug GWT. I love Emacs too, but to debug something you need a debugger.

I asked you a couple of questions about your project in a different email thread so I could help you get this working. If you're still interested in integrating Spiffy UI with your existing GWT project I'm happy to help you. If not, then I wish you luck with whatever path you choose.

Best,
Zack

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