Re: Grid Frameworks, Responsive Design and GWT

On Monday, August 5, 2013 11:52:59 PM UTC+2, Lavie Tobey wrote:

Hello GWT Community!

I'm looking to gather the collective knowledge of this community to answer a subjective question regarding GWT.  I'm starting to rewrite our suite of applications from scratch (i.e. version next) and our group is mainly made up of GWT engineers, so GWT will be the basis for the project moving forward.

I'm curious what other people in the GWT community are doing for responsive designs.  I have looked around the web a bunch and come up with a few possible choices:

First, I haven't yet had to write a "multiscreen" app, and lucky enough that we were able to "impose" some "minimum" dimensions to the viewport (I'm not proud of it, but it's one less technical issue to tackle, clients are annoying enough with their business needs/constraints/issues/non-goals/etc.) so I'm definitely not the one best suited to answer here.

 

1.  Use GWT a la the mobilewebapp sample project and provide by hand 3 sets of view components for desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.

I bootstrapped one such project, but the needs on tablet were different than on desktop (not the same type of users). It's not just about adapting the app on tablet, more about making a different app for the same backend.

 

2.  Use a framework like GWT-Bootstrap (is anyone else using this right now?) that wraps the native twitter bootstrap grid system.

I haven't looked at Bootstrap in details, even less GWT-Bootstrap, but I've read several (major) issues with GWT-Bootstrap on StackOverflow. I've heard you'd better use Bootstrap with a bit of JSNI when needed, than GWT-Bootstrap.

 

3.  Use a grid framework like twitter bootstrap, unsemantic, etc, etc, etc (there are tons), just accessing the classes they provide via UiBinder (or setting the class on your containers in the java code)

4.  Is there another way, or rather, what other ways are there?

I like building my overall layout with CSS alone (either in the HTML host page and using multiple RootPanel.get(String), or in UiBinder in an HTMLPanel with a bunch of SimplePanel or just @UiField DivElement)

Layout within "components" should work well with some "grid framework" (we didn't need "responsive design" so we used FlexBox; though I think with this approach we could adapt quite easily using @media queries)

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