Out with Flextable and in with FlowPanel for the designer

Thanks to a good friend and awesome web designer Wylie I have been cleaning up my GWT to make it more designer friendly. At first I was thinking maybe all this generated HTML is a really bad idea but I am starting to come around that it is much cleaner if the design is limited to just CSS changes. Wylie is great about pointing out poorly generated code:

When I was originally trying to lay things out I was using GWT layouts that where creating lots of tables. FlowPanel to the rescue that is now using div tags. One of the glaring missing layout types in GWT are list type. Since HTML supports lists it is strange that GWT does not support them natively. I created a wrapper for a list in about 15 minutes. For my current project I am glad I picked GWT and for a full blown web app still think it is better than the alternatives. The big test will be how easy it integrates into the backend.

Upgrade to Walkscore Widget

As with most things a good does of FAIL makes things better. So why not make a list of all the things that I did wrong.

• Ugly is not OK. Sure in development land ugly works but users don't use ugly crap with maybe a few exceptions like myspace.
• Small is good. Especially on a mobile phone's home screen. Yep my widget was taking up twice the space it needed. I ended up having to create a full activity to do this but such is life.
• Noise. Basically I had some additional text to help explain that they could not get walkscore if they had disabled the phones ability to locate them. Now that I added the feature to lookup any address they can have all phone location disabled and still use walkscore from the phone.

The only user comment I got also said they wanted more options. Unfortunately there are not many options to give. Either you have a walkscore for the current location or the address entered or you don't. 

A couple features I would like to add are first an address suggestion. If the user enters an address in that has a list of suggestions then I need to let them choose the address currently I just pick the first one. Another feature I need to add is to track the number of times the score is retrieved because I am currently limited on how many request I can make to the walkscore servers a day. Mega thanks for the icons goes to the great Wylie Fisther! 

GWT FlexTable is nice

UPDATE: More recent post Out with Flextable and in with FlowPanel for the designer where I point out the downside of trying to design with FlexTable.
Compared to YUI's Datatable GWT FlexTable is so much easier to work with.
I spent a couple months developing in YUI2 which I generally had a great experience developing it in. At times I felt it was a bit slow but batteries are included and could get a prototype built fast! Also I love that it is just Javascript code so it seems very potable and easy for other developers. Since I have been writing Android apps and Java is one of my first loves (all those twice bitten) GWT has not been difficult for me. Most recently working with FlexTable I have learned where GWT has a great advantage over YUI2.

I was trying to find out how to hook up mouse events on a table of data when I ran into the exact example I needed on stackoverflow. This was a cleaner and easier implementation for mouse events in GWT than in YUI. I have found this to be generally true that GWT much easier to organize the code base in for large projects. I still feel simple user interfaces are better off with something like jQuery and that GWT is on the other end of the spectrum with really large complex user interfaces.

Rendering and entire page seems slow to me now. AJAX interfaces are raising the bar for us web developers. No longer can we just cache pages in memcache and expect them to be fast. Render time is like 70% of the user waiting for the page to load. That is the new true measurement of performance.