Boulevard of Broken Builds

Today I ran into a surprising shortcoming of the Google Web Toolkit. For a particular project, the client had requested a link to an external page to be added to a panel. However, browsing through the GWT javadoc, I wasn’t able to find a widget which would make this possible. It seems that Google forces you to use either a HTML widget which prevents you from any validation or use the DOM object, which is rather cumbersome. Fortunately, a collegue of mine already encountered the same problem in a different project and had created his own widget for this purpose. By adopting his code, my problem was easily solved.