GWT in Action, Second Edition

17.1. What is deferred binding?

Let’s jump straight into an example of deferred binding in action through the GWT compiler. You might remember in chapter 11 that we used JSNI to determine the computed style of an element (the style the browser has computed).

The challenge was that we needed two implementations: one for standards-compliant browsers and one for the others (IE versions before version 9). The solution was to use deferred binding, and in chapter 11 we were more interested in discussing the JSNI aspects of the code, so we skipped what that meant. Now we’re going to get into it. You don’t need to have read the JSNI chapter to follow what we’re discussing here because we’re looking only at the deferred binding aspects in this chapter. ...