GWT and animation effects

I've already praised GWT and its highly productive environment for generating AJAX applications. I've been using it in my Very Cool Project with great pleasure, I must confess. Creating a highly interactive web application, brings back some of the entertaining aspects of programming again. Although, to be honest, it would have been nice to get rid of all those anonymous inner functions I find myself dealing with. Life (and code) would be a lot simpler with closures and higher order functions. Sometimes I find it ironic that GWT translates my anonymous-inner-classes-using code to JavaScript code with closures, higher order functions and all the other goodies. Apparently, a change of perspective is always an eye-opener.

My nagging aside, GWT is an enormous leap over other solutions for interactive web applications in Java. However, one area that has received little attention so far, is support for animation effects. The stuff that puts the candy in eye-candy. Certainly, there is always the option to use other JavaScript libraries that provide such effects through JSNI, like Scriptaculous, YUI, Ext JS and others. But that is not an efficient nor elegant way to do it. Memory leaks may creep up (particularly on Internet Explorer), separate download requests for the other scripts must be made and JSNI references are, er, how should I put it, um, chatty?

A better way involves using a GWT wrapper around the external effects JavaScript library. This way you get to reap the usual benefits of GWT, namely the minimum number of roundtrips to the server, compilation of just the code you need (the effects you actually use) and no detour to JavaScript-land (though lately I'm having second-thoughts about the goodness of this). The main solutions that have emerged so far are various Scriptaculous wrappers, an ext wrapper and gwt-fx.

I've tried both one Scriptaculous wrapper and the gwt-fx codebase and I would wholeheartedly recommend the latter. For starters, it feels like things are done "the GWT way": a single EffectPanel to decorate the widget that will be animated, separate effect classes for the most popular effects, sequential and parallel combinations of effects, deferred binding for browser-specific functionality, Listeners and Adapters and much more. Implementing a fade effect took me about 10 lines of Java code. And we all know Java is not the most succinct girl in town, right? Furthermore, while the Scriptaculous solution worked on IE, Firefox and Opera, it would barf on Safari (version 2 if you must know). gwt-fx worked on all of them without any special-casing in my code.

Also, when things don't work as expected, the author, Adam Tacy, is very cooperative and helpful. He has endured a flood of patches from me to solve some problems that I encountered, and when not satisfied with them, he implemented even better solutions after careful consideration and thoughtful reasoning. Just make sure to get the latest version (1.0.0) that has every bug I encountered so far, fixed.

Adding a supported effects library in the main GWT distribution has been discussed a few times on the contributors list, but apparently it is not a high priority task at the moment. For a good reason I might add, since the release of GWT 1.5 is just around the corner, with support for Java 5 and a whole slew of compiler optimizations. However, with the recent introduction of the GWT incubator project it might be appropriate to start trying out some design ideas on such a library and see how it goes. If you care for such an outcome, don't hesitate to let the GWT developers know about it, by joining the discussion in the recent thread on the subject.