SmartClient 8.0 Beta
It’s finally here – the SmartClient 8.0 Beta. This release has been a long time coming but the changes are well worth the wait. Check out the details at the Isomorphic blog.
My development work has taken a bit of a twist as I have been doing some projects with SmartGWT. I will say the environment provided by Eclipse and the forced class management as dictated by Java do guide the development in a very manageable direction.
I still don’t like the debugging environment because you can’t really see the JavaScript object properties and the turn around time for refreshing a page is really slow. It gets even worse if the change is to a class variable or event handler because it forces a server restart.
However, when you can avoid setting JSO attributes and stick with the wrapped libraries, the code only fails because of a logic issue, not a compiler / interpreter issue.
Interesting work 
Changing a class variable or event handler on the client side GWT code does not require a server restart. What happens when you try this?
Eclipse says it “Hot code replace failed – Scheme change not implemented” when I add or remove a private property on a class. There are other times I don’t know why it wants me to restart but it does. I know there are things that just can’t be hot replaced but this wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t take a total of about 1 minute 45 seconds to restart within in Eclipse and refresh the web page to get back running…
In “regular” Java, you cannot hot deploy certain code changes like the addition on members, or renaming of methods etc. However with GWT Java code you can make any code change including the addition of new classes etc and simply refresh your hosted mode browser. You do not need to compile the client side GWT code changes. If you do Eclipse might needlessly try to hot-deploy and complain thinking its “real” Java code. IntelliJ does not have this issue.
Because modern IDE’s like Eclipse / IDEA automatically highlight code errors you can easily identify and fix them without requiring to compile the client side GWT code.
So it seems I should just ignore the Terminate/Restart prompts from Eclipse and refresh the browser. I’m not going through the compile cycle until I need to test in a browser without the GWT plug-in support. That will surely shorten the edit/test cycle significantly!