GWT: Common Exceptions – NoClassDefFoundError

This seems to be a problem that nearly everyone hits when starting with GWT. It causes confusion because the code is error free at compile time, yet throws a java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError exception at runtime. The problem is simple to correct. You’ll probably have included the required library into your build path already and that’s why you’re not getting compile time errors. The additional step that is to have the JAR-file(s) that contain the required libraries be copied to your project’s war/WEB-INF/lib directory. Note that your JAR-files must exist in the root of this directory, and not in any sub-directories.

Force.com vs GAE + GWT

Salesforce could be regarded as the cloud computing leader but history tells us that many-a-giant has fallen before. Apple has; Microsoft has; IBM has. I think Salesforce is still on the up ‘n up, but there are contenders out there and some of them are noteworthy; probably the most obvious of these is Google. Over the past few months I’ve dug into the Google cloud platform and I thought it was time to attempt a side-by-side comparison of my two favourite PaaS providers.

The bigger they are ...

Some quick definitions are probably in order:

Force.com is a cloud computing platform as a service offering from Salesforce, the first of its kind allowing developers to build multi tenant applications that are hosted on their servers as a service.

Google App Engine is a platform for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers.

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is an open source set of tools that allows web developers to create and maintain complex JavaScript front-end applications in Java.

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