GWT + iPhone == Pretty Tasty - Google Web Toolkit

It's now been a few weeks since the release of GWT 1.4 and Apple's iPhone. We've spent some of that time learning how to optimize Google Web Toolkit applications for the iPhone. Since nothing beats experience with real code, we decided to write an application that we would find useful and that shows off the cool features of the iPhone. The result is the GWT Feed Reader, an RSS feed reader that uses the Google AJAX Feed API with a user interface optimized for the iPhone. This article will discuss what we've learned from writing this RSS reader.

There's good news and bad news about using GWT to develop applications for the Apple iPhone. The good news is that writing a GWT application that targets the iPhone is no different from writing any other application. The bad news is that the way in which your users interact with the application is somewhat different from how they interact with a "desktop" GWT application. For more than just occasional use, your users will want an interface optimized for their device. Even though your existing GWT applications may execute on the iPhone, it might not be very easy to use, or feel like a mobile application should.

Before we dive in, it's worth noting that developers that intend to target the iPhone should refer to Apple's development guide for the iPhone. It covers how users interact with web applications on the iPhone, ways to optimize your application for the iPhone, and links to other iPhone-related development communities. These guidelines are applicable to static content as well as client-side application development using GWT.

Instead of covering the basics of writing a GWT application, we'll stick to highlighting the design decisions that we made to make the GWT Feed Reader a usable mobile application. Most of design stems from understanding the limitations of the device.

Interface design decisions:

The iPhone has three primary UI gestures: tapping (or pointing), swiping, and double-taps. Tapping is the primary command gesture, analogous to a mouse click, and can be handled with standard ClickListener.onClick() events. Swiping, in both vertical and horizontal directions, is used to pan the viewport over the (sometimes larger) virtual page.

When the UI can be designed as a vertically strip, a properly-sized Panel, combined with the viewport meta tag, can be easily adapted to provide a "wall-to-wall" layout that eliminates horizontal scrolling. Applications that are designed to fit entirely within a single column should set a viewport width of 320 pixels by adding <meta name="viewport" content="width=320"> in the <head> section of the host page. CSS width rules using relative sizes will use the size of the actual viewport, and not the default virtual page size of 980 pixels. If you experience unwanted horizontal overflow, the width of various widgets can be constrained by use of the max-width CSS attribute. This is especially useful to constrain images from sources that may not target the iPhone directly. In the case of the GWT Feed Reader, user scaling is disabled completely to decrease the navigational complexity of the user interface by specifying the viewport meta content="width=320; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=0;".

The double-tap gesture will zoom the document to fill the screen with the element enclosing the target point. This maps very nicely onto the Element-per-Widget design of GWT's UI toolkit. By structuring your widget hierarchy to group related collections of Widgets into Panels (and perhaps nesting related Panels in outer panels), the double-tap gesture will allow the user to navigate the document in a hierarchical fashion and allow more effective targeting of the zoom region.

It's important to remember that fingers are both opaque and of non-zero size when pressed against the display on the iPhone. If we assume that the smallest target should be about the size of a pressed fingertip, we have a minimum size of a quarter of an inch square. The iPhone's screen has better than average dot pitch of 160 dpi, making the smallest useful target on the order of 40x40 pixels. If the application is intended for use on the iPhone as well as the desktop, you will want to use CSS media selectors to load the correct stylesheet as outlined in the iPhone developer's guide.

Element-per-Widget design:

The Document Object Model (DOM) specification defines a hierarchical box model that is used to compose the image that is displayed on your screen when you view a web page. Typically, web browsers convert the HTML data received from a web server into a DOM structure, however it is also possible to manipulate the DOM via purely programmatic means via client-side JavaScript code. The GWT UI classes provide abstractions over the underlying DOM structures that they represent, allowing you, the developer, to think about high-level Widgets and Panels, rather than collections of DOM elements. Each Widget has associated with it a DOM Element that represents the Widget in the DOM. Simple Widgets, such as Button, can be represented by a single DOM Element.

More complicated Widgets, like VerticalPanel, have a single root Element that act as containers for the Elements of child Widgets. The individual rows of the VerticalPanel are Elements that can be targeted by the zoom gesture. If the Widgets contained by the VerticalPanel are of unequal widths, the zoom gesture will still allow the user to approximately zoom in on the row's element, even in the case of missing the desired Widget. The user can then more accurately target the desired widget, as it will have increased in visible

Improving interactions:

Both actual as well as perceived application performance are critically important factors to consider when designing user interactions. If the application pauses, hangs, or otherwise stalls during use, users will very quickly become frustrated. Progressive (or lazy) rendering in the UI and retention of already-rendered UI elements adds to the perception of responsiveness. Applications typically "feel faster" and annoy the user less when something happens immediately in response to a user's event, even if it is to simply displaying a "Loading..." message. Using DeferredCommand.addCommand() with an IncrementalCommand allows you to implement a "deferred Iterator". This will avoid blocking the UI event loop while you create UI elements from a list of data objects:

final List objects = ....;
DeferredCommand.addCommand(new IncrementalCommand() {
Iterator i = objects.iterator();
public boolean execute() {
    Foo foo = (Foo)i.next();
    .... do something ...
    return i.hasNext();
}
});

Robust use of GWT's History support adds to the usability of the application. The browser's back and forward buttons are always on-screen, so you may as well take advantage of them in your application. Most of the state changes within the GWT Feed Reader are controlled by history tokens. Instead of having user-generated events directly cause panels to be shown or hidden, the code simply executes a History.newItem() call. This ensures that externally-driven behavior (back/forward, deep-linking) is identical to UI-driven behavior and serves to decouple event-handling code from presentation code. For example, articles in a feed are viewed by setting the history token to a combination of the feed's URL and the link target URL of the article. See the processHistoryToken() function.

Program data:

Minimizing the number of round-trips to the server was also a design priority for the GWT Feed Reader application. We are using ImmutableResourceBundle and StyleInjector from the new GWT Incubator project. This combination allows program resources, such as CSS and background-image files to be either cached "forever" or inlined directly into the GWT application. The latter behavior allows the feed reader to always be able to render correctly, even when the iPhone is temporarily unable to access the Internet. Programmatic access to module Resources also helps in the development phase, because the compiler will warn you of missing files. As an additional deployment optimization, the module selection script has been inlined into the host HTML page as a post-build step. The net effect of these optimizations is that the entire GWT Feed Reader application and all of its runtime resources can be downloaded in just two HTTP round-trips.

The Feed Reader needs to get its feed data from somewhere. Enough of the Google AJAX Feed API was imported with Java bindings using the GWT JavaScript Interop project. This eliminated the need to hand-write JSNI calls to the underlying JavaScript API by declaring the binding with a flyweight-style API. The binding classes are located in the com.google.gwt.ajaxfeed package.

Because this is a ultimately a demonstration app that needs to be able to run without server support (e.g. from a local filesystem), we use GWT's support for manipulating browser cookies to store configuration and last-read information. The data is stored as a JSON-encoded string in the cookie and accessed through the Configuration class. A more fully-featured version of the application might include server-side support for configuration and tracking last-read articles.

Wrapping it up:

After deciding on the UI layout style, implementing the RSS reader application was just like writing any other GWT application. Much of the gross feature set was worked out with hosted-mode development and then the fit-and-finish of the application was finalized using a combination of Safari3 and an iPhone. Most of the time, the test application was accessed over the EDGE network, to simulate the typical use case. Targeting the high-latency, low-bandwidth configuration makes using the application on a WiFi network even better.

We look forward to seeing more GWT applications on the iPhone in the future. If you are interested in the code for the GWT Feed Reader, it is Open-Source under the Apache 2.0 License, and has its own project page on Google Code.

Happy coding,
-The Google Web Toolkit Team.

Version:

GWT Discussion Group Charter	Aug 27
GWT + iPhone == Pretty Tasty	Feb 28
Security for GWT Applications	Feb 28
gwt-logo-42x42.png	Mar 19
news_ent.css	Feb 2
get.pdf	Jan 24
toolkit.svg	Jan 17
toolkit_proposed_icon_128.png	Jan 17
toolkit_proposed_icon_64.png	Jan 17
Running GWT hosted mode with an external Tomcat server.pdf	Dec 4