Setting Up GXT Explorer in Eclipse: Quick Guide

  • 14/4/2011
  • 2-minute read

The Sencha GXT Explorer sample remains a handy reference when maintaining legacy GWT projects. Follow this checklist to load the example project inside Eclipse and confirm the widget catalogue runs end-to-end.

Prerequisites

  • Eclipse IDE with the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) plugin installed
  • Java 6 or 7 JDK to match historic project requirements
  • GXT 2.2.3 distribution downloaded from the Sencha archive

Setup Steps

  1. Extract the GXT download and read the bundled setup.txt to understand expected directory structure.
  2. Create a new GWT project in Eclipse (File → New → Web Application Project) pointing at the samples/GXT Explorer sources.
  3. Add each samples/**/src directory to the build path (Right-click → Build Path → Use As Source Folder).
  4. Unpack samples/examples.war into the project war/ directory so static assets are available to DevMode.
  5. Replace the outdated WEB-INF/lib/gxt.jar with gxt-2.2.3-gwt22.jar to align with the GWT 2.2 runtime.

Run and Verify

  1. Launch via Run As → Web Application and open http://127.0.0.1:8888/Explorer.html.
  2. Ensure widget samples render without missing-resource errors. Run Project → Clean if compiled classes are stale.
  3. Optional: export a WAR and deploy to a local servlet container (Jetty/Tomcat) for parity with production environments.

Troubleshooting

  • Confirm the DevMode server uses the same JDK version as the project to prevent class-version errors.
  • If compilation fails, clear derived folders (Project → Clean) and refresh the workspace.
  • Legacy GXT builds are no longer supported; prioritise upgrades to modern UI frameworks before deploying any new functionality.
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