On Tuesday, Alex Tkachman over at Jetbrains announced that he had developed a plugin that adds support for Google Web Toolkit (GWT) to IntelliJ. As he says, it’s only a "first prototype yet but it definitely gives an idea about direction we are targeting." There is more information and a watchable demo here.

I don’t use IntelliJ myself, but from the demo it appears to perform a number of useful functions:

• It does all of the messy setup of the GWT Eclipse project and application creation for you.
• It allows you to create several GWT entities via menus: Module, Entry Point, Remote Service (client and server side classes), and Serializable classes.
  
• It allows you to edit Java and Javascript in the same editor window.
• It will detect use of undefined CSS styles in your Java code and allow you to automatically create it in the module’s style sheet.
• It will both launch the GWT application runner and compile the Javascript for you.

All of this isn’t exactly earth shattering, but it does take some of the tedium out of developing with GWT. The automatic creation of a Remote Service with it’s three files (shades of EJB) is especially nice.

I didn’t see anything in the demo about deployment, however. It would be nice if IntelliJ were to package the application up in a nice WAR file, ready to go. I’ve been tinkering with an Eclipse plugin for GWT. Mine just builds the application skelleton for you right now. Maybe I have to aim a little higher.

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