I’m still pretty enthusiastic about the benefits of templating [1] GWT UIs with HTML as it turns out to be a productive way for altering UIs without going through a tedious compilation and deployment procedure.
HtmlUnit 2.9 is a great java browser for integration-testing Ajax applications. It works fine with GWT and we use it a lot at Bazarooma because it allows us to test any user interaction in a matter of seconds. In conjunction with the particular approach to HTML templating we noticed a peculiar problem with HtmlUnit: assuming there is an inner link in the page such as
<a id="overview" href="#overview">Site overview</a>
which we wrapped in a Hyperlink, then the following code
HtmlAnchor e = (HtmlAnchor)page.getFirstByXPath("//a[@id='overview']");
HtmlPage page = e.click();
will not trigger a history event and the application does not react to that simulated click. It turns out that by not wrapping the link into an Hyperlink instance programmatic clicks work just fine even in HtmlUnit.
Resources
[1] Speeding up initial page view of Ajax applications with static HTML
https://blog.georgovassilis.com/2012/03/25/speeding-up-initial-page-view-of-ajax-applications-with-static-html/
George's Techblog 