gwt knowledge

I did some forum searching but didn't really find the answer I was looking for. I don't have a lot of GWT knowledge and if I understand things correctly, all of the Vaadin (IT Mill) widgets are built from scratch and do not use GWT, however, the foundation of Vaadin is still heavily tied to GWT and it's client-side engine.

My question is how much GWT do I really need to know to be fluent with Vaadin? I'm concerned that as I encounter more complex issues my lack of GWT understanding is going to come back to haunt me.

Gregg Bolinger: if I understand things correctly, all of the Vaadin (IT Mill) widgets are built from scratch and do not use GWT, however, the foundation of Vaadin is still heavily tied to GWT and it's client-side engine.

All Vaadin widgets are based on GWT, but not all use their GWT counterparts. For example VCheckBox (the client-side counterpart of the server-side CheckBox) extends GWT CheckBox, so it just adds the Vaadin integration code for client-server serialization, etc. Many other components, however, don't use their GWT equivalent widget, for example, VLabel extends GWT HTML widget, which is a lower-level widget.

My question is how much GWT do I really need to know to be fluent with Vaadin? I'm concerned that as I encounter more complex issues my lack of GWT understanding is going to come back to haunt me.

You don't usually need to know anything about GWT if the built-in components in Vaadin are enough for you. For most applications, they should be enough. Knowledge of GWT is only necessary if you need to make new components (other than CustomComponent, which is a server-side component composition feature).

Thanks Marko.