Are there any good tools for integrating GWT with ASP.Net? [closed]

Answer 1

According to the GWT FAQ, you should be able to do this.

The heart of AJAX is making data read/write calls to a server from the JavaScript application running in the browser. GWT is "RPC agnostic" and has no particular requirements about what protocol is used to issue RPC requests, or even what language the server code is written in. Although GWT provides a library of classes that makes the RPC communications with a J2EE server extremely easy, you are not required to use them. Instead you can build custom HTTP requests to retrieve, for example, JSON or XML-formatted data.

I'm not aware of any projects to simplify the object serialization/deserialization logic though, if that was your question.

The client-side GWT code gets compiled to javascript, therefore it doesn't matter what server you use to serve it.

Answer 2

Have a look at the Smart GWT library - its data-binding layer can directly call SOAP web services (standard .asmx).

Answer 3

Try SharpKit, it allows you to write in C#, and convert to JavaScript during compilation. It also available as a command line executable. It supports many popular web libraries like jQuery, it also supports full C# 4 language syntax and .NET 4.0.

Answer 4

Anybody reading this question: please ignore the Accepted answer. It's completely mistaken. The OP wants to use GWT with an ASP.Net backend, he doesn't want to produce GWT using ASP.Net. Any backend language that can produce JSON/JSONP can quickly integrate with GWT via Javascript overlays.

Answer 5

smcmahon's answer truly helped my company get this going, and now we are doing this regularly - developing the front end using GWT and the backend with .NET/MS technologies.

I've been a MS developer my whole life - latest silverlight frontend with .net backend. it took about a month worth of work but finally we implemented a smooth process to develop single page GWT apps in Eclipse, using .NET backend/web services developed in visual studio 2010. On the .NET side we receive/transfer all objects in JSON rather than XML (we use Newtonsoft JSON generator because .NET default JSON generation from WCF web services gave problems, especially with dates). On the GWT side we use overlay types.

We wrote an app which generates code (from the .NET app) and automatically writes it to our GWT project - it generates all classes that we need and also writes functions for easy calls to the web services. On top of this, we were able to get the .NET web services functioning while we run the app in GWT, which makes it WAY easy to debug. then when we are done with project changes, we compile to javascript/html - copy that to visual studio, and deploy our project. couldn't be simpler.

It took a lot of work to figure all this out with the help of this thread, but was TOTALLY worth it once we did since we are a straight microsoft shop with SQL server backend and IIS windows servers. Silverlight was great, but now we are moving to the point where staff are getting pads and need to run apps on their phones as well.

We use UIBinder for the interface. Love the GUI designer/xml declarative layout, and modularity. Can still use any HTML/CSS we want by having the UiBinder HTML panels in the UI. The uiBinder designer even recognizes CSS3 tags and renders them better than IE9 does.

GWT was a great solution, and Java was very easy to learn coming from a C# background.

Answer 6

If you are using SmartGWT, it includes a RestDataSource which provides a pre-built JSON or XML protocol that you can implement in .NET. This series of articles from our public wiki shows how to build an ASP.NET MVC backend for RestDataSource that implements all 4 CRUD operations, database transactions and support for SmartGWT AdvancedCriteria (using NHibernate):

http://wiki.smartclient.com/display/Main/Integrating+with+ASP.Net+MVC

In this particular case, SmartClient was used rather than SmartGWT, but all the backend code is identical (SmartGWT just provides GWT support for SmartClient; it's the same code under the hood). The front-end code is trivial and easily translated to SmartGWT.

This code on the wiki is all free, and so is the editing of SmartGWT needed to build the front-end (it's open source under the LGPL).