Chapter 12. Classic Ajax and HTML forms

This chapter covers

  • Classic Ajax support

  • Loading and parsing external XML data

  • Using FormPanel

  • Widgets for use with FormPanel

In chapter 10, we showed you how you can use the GWT-RPC mechanism to communicate between the Java application server and the browser to pass Java objects. But what if you don’t have a Java application server? What if you use PHP, .NET, or even plain vanilla CGI scripts? Or, what if you want to load static configuration files from the server? These are just some of the situations where the GWT-RPC mechanism doesn’t quite do the job.

In this chapter, classic Ajax and good old HTML forms come to our rescue. These tools are generic and flexible, and GWT provides a set of objects that allows ...

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