GWT-Wizard: A GWT Wizard Widget for Your Project

GWT-Wizard is a wizard widget for use in your own GWT projects. It tries to make as few assumptions as possible about your needs, making it a flexible and powerful tool, while still providing sane defaults that allow simple projects to get up and running with as little configuration as possible.

GWT-Wizard has a few nice features, including the following:

• Flexible view component: use the built in view, or provide your own by implementing provided interfaces.
• Support for lazy-loading wizard pages: if you don't want to attach your wizard's pages to the DOM right away, enable lazy loading and attachment and extend LazyComposite for your page widgets.
• Useful transition hooks for each of your pages: use methods like beforeShow() and beforeNext() to do setup, cleanup, validation and more in your pages. Cancel page navigation via the provided NavigationEvent if you want to cancel a page transition. Set up two-way links between pages based on user input.
• Flexible behavior with sane defaults: GWT-Wizard lets you customize virtually every element of your wizard, from how it looks to how it behaves. But, if you just want a simple, linear wizard, you don't have to customize anything.

Getting Started

Getting started with GWT-Wizard is easy:

1. Build the project (see below) or download a JAR from the project's home page.
2. Put gwt-wizard.jar on your project's build path
3. Inherit the wizard module with <inherits name='net.binarymuse.gwt.Wizard' />
4. Extend WizardContext to define your context object
5. Create one or more page for your wizard (a single-page wizard seems kinda silly) by extending WizardPage (the only methods you must provide are getTitle(), getPageID(), and asWidget())
6. Create a new wizard with new Wizard("Wizard Title", contextObject) (you can also pass a custom view if you so wish)
7. Call wizard.addPage() for each of the pages you wish to add to your wizard
8. Attach the wizard to the DOM

More Details and Examples

You can find code samples, working examples, and more at the GWT-Wizard's home on the web.

Project Status

GWT-Wizard should be considered alpha software. The API is highly malleable and may change from commit to commit.

Build Quick-Start

Assuming you have GWT installed to /path/to/gwt/gwt-x.y.z/ and Apache Ant installed:

1. Clone the project and change to the project directory: git clone git://github.com/BinaryMuse/gwt-wizard.git && cd gwt-wizard
2. Specify the path of the GWT library: export GWTPATH=/path/to/gwt/gwt-x.y.z/
3. Run the Ant script to build the project and create a JAR: ant jar

Detailed Build Target Information

The build.xml file supplies several Apache Ant build targets:

Building GWT-Wizard

• Target Command: ant compile
• Task: Compile the GWT-Wizard project and copy both the uncompiled source files and the compiled class files to the directory bin.
• Depends On:
  • GWT installed to /path/to/gwt/gwt-x.y.z/
  • Environment variable GWTPATH set to the value /path/to/gwt/gwt-x.y.z/
• Cleaning: ant clean

Creating a JAR

• Target Command: ant jar
• Task: Package the uncompiled source and compiled class files into a JAR named gwt-wizard.jar.
• Depends On:
  • Target compile
• Cleaning: ant clean-jar

Creating the JavaDoc

• Target Command: ant doc
• Task: Create the GWT-Wizard JavaDoc in the directory doc.
• Depends On: none
• Cleaning: ant clean-doc

Creating the Site

• Target Command: ant site
• Task: Compile the GWT-Wizard site (http://gwt-wizard.binarymuse.net) into the directory pages-source/output. Copies the JavaDoc if the doc task is ran first.
• Depends On:
  • Ruby installed
  • nanoc installed (gem install nanoc)
  • RedCloth installed (gem install RedCloth)
  • CodeRay installed (gem install coderay)
  • Nokogiri installed (gem install nokogiri) (rquired libxml2-dev and libxslt1-dev on my Ubuntu box)
• Cleaning: ant clean-site

Cleaning All

• Target Command: ant clean-all
• Task: Run all the clean targets

What's Missing

There are a few things missing from the current iteration of GWT-Wizard:

• Removing pages: once a page has been added to a wizard, it can't be removed
• DOM dependence: there is some DOM/GWT dependence in classes that should be a presenter (in the MVP sense)
• Unit Tests: there are currently no unit tests checked in for the project

License

GWT-Wizard is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.