I just noticed a couple of new, in-depth reviews of Ryan Dewsbury’s book, . Masud Idris at developerlife didn’t seem to like the book that much. Here’s an excerpt from his book review:

At the end of the day, I found the book to be ok. The book was useful to me and I learned quite a bit from it. It just took forever to get through it due to the average writing and confusing code.

In contrast, Joseph Ottinger at TheServerSide thought the book was excellent. From his review:

Altogether, Google Web Toolkit Applications is an excellent book, well worth the list price of $49.99 (USD) if you’re doing any serious GWT development. It’s well written, very much in depth, and shows application patterns that will be very useful for anyone using GWT, in many cases showing concepts that are very difficult to find elsewhere.

It’s always interesting and informative to hear other people’s opinions. Has anyone else received their copy of the book yet? What did you guys think of it?

Here are some GWT related links from the past couple of weeks.

• – Lots of new things in this latest version including enhancements to the Beans module.
• Ray Cromwell is looking to setup some hardcore GWT training sessions if there is enough interest. Ray is one of the experts in the GWT community so let him know if you’re interested.
• – All of the presentations from last months GWT conference are now online. I’ve only gone through a couple so far, but they’re quite good from what I’ve seen.
• Google Web Toolkit Applications Book Review – Check out my book review of the latest GWT book by Ryan Dewsbury.
• – This latest release uses deferred binding to handle the logging levels which reduces logging overhead.
• – This project allows you to integrate your GWT client code with Rails’ REST web services.
• MyGWT 0.4.4 and 0.5.0 Alpha 1 released – MyGWT 0.4.4 is the latest stable release while the 0.5.0 Alpha 1 build contains some new features including the new TreeTable and PagingToolBar widgets.
• Gwittir 102: Tables and Flow – Robert Cooper has another article up, showing how to create an iPhone RSS Reader using the Gwittir library.
• Google Web Toolkit Solutions Book Review – The guys at developerlife have their review up of this book by David Geary and Rob Gordon.

If you haven’t already, don’t forget to leave a comment to this post to have a chance to win a free copy of GWT Designer. The contest ends next Friday.

Thanks to the great folks at Instantiations, I am giving away a free one year subscription of GWT Designer ($39 value). GWT Designer is a really nice GUI builder for developing GWT applications in Eclipse. Instead of spending a lot of time coding your user interface by hand, you can use GWT Designer’s graphical design view to easily layout all your GWT widgets and panels using drag and drop.

GWT Designer using the GWT Kitchen Sink example

I have a copy myself and I like it a lot. I use the built in Wizards all the time to quickly create my GWT applications. If you’ve ever used Netbeans’ Matisse for building Swing GUIs, you’ll know how much time a good GUI builder can save you.

So, how do you win? It’s quite simple. Just leave a comment to this post, telling us what your favorite GWT third-party library is. That’s it! Check back in a week, and I will announce the winner from one of the commentors. Hopefully this will be the first of many giveaways so be sure to to keep yourself updated. Good luck!

Update (1/14/08)

Congratulations to the winner, Mark Chance. Thanks to everyone who participated. There should be chances to win some cool stuff in the future, so don’t miss out.