UI design with GWT

Question

I'm hiring a designer to build UI for my web application. However I'm completely lost about how to integrate the design he will deliver to me with the GWT web application.

There are plenty of ways to build a UI in GWT. I believe the best choice for this case would be the UI binder, where I can use HTML to build the pages. However GWT widgets like textbox, dropdown, buttons, etc. have their own CSS that is not the same css of the page. So I believe this integration is a little bit confusing.

Am I correct about the difficulty of this task? Is there a proper way to do that (maybe creating a GWT theme)? Should I hire someone to do this integration? If yes, what is the kind of professional I'm looking for?

Answer 1

I had a similar situation at work once. If you use ui:Binder, your web designer can develop most of the user interface using HTML and CSS, languages they would already know. There might be a little integration work to be done, but most of the application's UI can be built in a traditional, declarative way.

Note that there are some annoyances here. For some of the components, it's easier to use a GWT widget rather than a pure HTML element. However, GWT sometimes converts this to odd HTML, so it'll take some time for the designer to learn how GWT displays widgets and modify the style sheets accordingly.