GWT with maven and eclipse

Setting up a latest GWT project in eclipse along with Maven was not straight forward. Here is step-by-step guide on how I managed to setup my environment.

I assume you have Eclipse installed with m2eclipse plugin. Also Maven installed and its maven executable is in your environment PATH.

Run the below maven archetype to create a project shell. I named my project gwttest.

mvn archetype:create -DarchetypeGroupId=com.totsp.gwt -DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-googlewebtoolkit2-archetype -DarchetypeVersion=1.0.4 -DgroupId=com.gwttest -DartifactId=gwttest

The above command will create a directory "gwttest".

In the generated pom.xml, change the gwt version to the version you are using. The version should be available in the maven repository. I used latest GWT version 1.6.4. Also remove the pluginRepositories and unpack plugin from the pom.xml as that it is not required.

Create an Application.launch file in your project with the below content. Launch file is required to run the project from Eclipse.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<launchConfiguration type="org.eclipse.jdt.launching.localJavaApplication">
<booleanAttribute key="org.eclipse.jdt.launching.DEFAULT_CLASSPATH" value="false"/>
<listAttribute key="org.eclipse.jdt.launching.CLASSPATH">
<listEntry value="<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<runtimeClasspathEntry containerPath="org.eclipse.jdt.launching.JRE_CONTAINER" javaProject="gwttest" path="1" type="4"/>
"/>
<listEntry value="<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<runtimeClasspathEntry internalArchive="gwttest/src/main/java" path="3" type="2"/>
"/>
<listEntry value="<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<runtimeClasspathEntry id="org.eclipse.jdt.launching.classpathentry.defaultClasspath">
<memento project="gwttest"/>
</runtimeClasspathEntry>
"/>
</listAttribute>
<stringAttribute key="org.eclipse.jdt.launching.PROJECT_ATTR" value="gwttest"/>
<stringAttribute key="org.eclipse.jdt.launching.MAIN_TYPE" value="com.google.gwt.dev.HostedMode"/>
<stringAttribute key="org.eclipse.jdt.launching.PROGRAM_ARGUMENTS" value="-war target\gwttest-1.0-SNAPSHOT com.gwttest.Application"/>
<stringAttribute key="org.eclipse.jdt.launching.VM_ARGUMENTS" value="-Xmx256M"/>
<booleanAttribute key="org.eclipse.debug.core.appendEnvironmentVariables" value="true"/>
</launchConfiguration>

In Eclipse go to File > Import > General > Maven Projects. Select the directory "gwttest" and finish.

To generate a war file right click on the project > Run As > Maven package. The war file will be created under gwttest\target folder.

To test right click on the Application.launch file > Run As > Application. The sample GWT application will start in hosted mode.

To debug right click on the Application.launch file > Debug As > Application.