The Google Web Toolkit looks cool, but at the moment, Mac users might think they are locked out: on the download page, you can choose Windows or Linux. And if you download either one, you might be discouraged to find shared libraries in the form of .dll or .so files.

The Linux version does work on the Mac, but you won’t be able to run it in hosted mode since that mode depends on SWT (that’s what those shared libraries are there for, apparently). Hosted mode gives you more debugging power, so you are giving that up on the Mac.

To use web mode, run the autogenerated MyApplication-compile script to compile it all to JavaScript, then open MyApplication.html in a browser.

Here are the steps to unpack it and create your first app. I haven’t gone beyond these basics, but it should be enough to get you started:

$ tar xfz gwt-linux-1.0.20.tar.gz

$ cd gwt-linux-1.0.20/

$ ./applicationCreator com.mycompany.client.MyApplication
Created directory /Users/bjepson/src/gwt-linux-1.0.20/src
[etc., etc.]

$ ./MyApplication-compile
Output will be written into ./www/com.mycompany.MyApplication
Copying all files found on public path
Compilation succeeded

$ cd www/com.mycompany.MyApplication/

$ open MyApplication.html

Once you’ve done that, you should see something like the following: