As an experienced UI developer and designer, you know that you are going to need views, dialogs, menus, buttons, trees, tables, error dialogs, etc. You also know that you will want a nicely laid out directory structure to hold all your files and to establish a "place" for everything and everything in its "place". But where do you start... being new to GWT?
I started with a book. I chose Essential GWT - Building for the Web with Google Web Toolkit 2. My development platform is a Mac and my editor is the SpringSource Tool Suite (aka Eclipse). Starting with an example from the book, build your initial app and get it running. Spend some time modifying it and trying out different scenarios that the book covers. Learn about MVP (Model, View, Presenter) and adopt it to your liking. Understand how HTML + CSS and Java (compiled into javascript) will all fit together and will be used to make your application.
Make a change in Eclipse, save it and rebuild your app, then just refresh your browser and see how the changes automagically made it to your browser without stopping and restarting....very cool and will be so useful when you really get going.
As part of your initial design work, you will need to figure out what your app will be displaying and if you will need some 3rd party toolkits or if you want to go it natively with just the GWT basics? Native GWT will give you all the building blocks, but things like progress widgets, busy indicators, canvas renderers, etc. will not be there without bringing in some additional widgets. You may also want to bring in some Javascript widgets and integrate them, which is quite easy to do (a blog entry on that forthcoming).
Understand that you are on the web, in a browser, with a certain set of user expectations that are different that an installed application, but that line is blurring all the time.
I will be adding blog entries about GWT from here on out that provide specific small coding examples that answer "how do you do that?".
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