Many visual bugs in GWT Designer

[GoogleCodeExporter]

What steps will reproduce the problem?

The designer behaves strange. When I open the minimal sample project (attached) 
I see that the design area is shrunk to something like 400x300: 
http://i.imgur.com/yfLIgbG.png

After I change some property in a widget (for example, text or name) the design 
area becomes bigger but sometimes completely blank: 
http://i.imgur.com/hS1AJ0w.png

If I switch to another tab it draws the content from the previous tab but 
widgets' frames show the current tab widgets: http://i.imgur.com/94k5W8J.png 
(here the second tab is selected but it looks like it's the first)

Every time I switch the tab it shows the previous tab but actually controls 
from the current tab are there and can be selected/edited: 
http://i.imgur.com/7k9Ct8z.png (the third tab is selected, looks like it's the 
second).

If I edit properties of widgets the interface becomes blank again and only 
widgets frames are visible: http://i.imgur.com/WVPW7Zs.png

This happens for quite a while (I'd say from the very beginning since I started 
working with GWT), I tried it on Debian Squeeze, Wheezy, Jessie, Ubuntu 12.04, 
no difference. Tried turning on and off every option in designer's settings 
including "Disable Preview Window flickering workarounds". Also suspected 
Awesome WM and some feature called "reparenting WM" so I've installed MATE 
desktop environment (GNOME 2 successor) and launched Eclipse there. No luck, 
same glitches. I'm out of ideas now. It works more or less stable on Windows.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?

Switching tabs should show the actual tab. Design area should be large enough 
to show everything inside, there should be the way to set its size. There are 
such fields as width and height in d2gwt 2.6.0 (which is called "standalone") 
but they're missing in the GPE version which is newer. Nevertheless, both 
versions draw the tabs incorrectly often showing up blank window.

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?

Debian GNU/Linux amd64, Ubuntu 12.04 i686, Eclipse 3.7/4.2, GWT 2.5.1

I use Eclipse from eclipse.org, not the repo one, clean install, clean 
workspace. GWT Editor is from GPE (also tried older 2.6.0 one from d2gwt, no 
difference). WindowBuilder is 1.6.0.r42x201305211944, also tried 1.5.0 and 
1.5.2 to no avail. libwebkitgtk-1.0-0 1.8.1-3.4.

Please provide any additional information below.

Attached maven project, may be imported to Eclipse. To work around the issue I 
used xulrunner version before with export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1

Though the only supported version is very old 1.9 which is hard to get on 
modern distros and now on Debian Jessie Eclipse crashes on "Initializing GWT 
development mode" complaining about GLib. I read that this crash happened with 
Iceweasel (rebranded Firefox) and the workaround was to downgrade libglib but 
now I can't do this without uninstalling a half of my system. Also, xulrunner 
sometimes renders everything black (on the other hand WebKit often renders 
everything white thus blank). Though when it draws controls it does it 
correctly where they should be. I use it on Debian Squeeze on work as a lesser 
evil.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by radioano...@gmail.com on 20 Jun 2013 at 6:41

Attachments:

• gdtglitch.tar.bz2

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Any update on this? At least a confirmation? It's almost impossible to use the 
designer in Eclipse 4.3 Kepler because it seems to be using WebKit even when I 
set GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1 and everything is blank, only borders of some of 
controls are visible. Switching tabs of the TabLayoutPanel doesn't help. I have 
no idea what I can do at this point.

Original comment by radioano...@gmail.com on 2 Aug 2013 at 11:10

[GoogleCodeExporter]

[deleted comment]

[GoogleCodeExporter]

*(Removed my previous post, forgot some details)*

Having the exact same problem, very annoying. Most of the time I can press the 
widget (in the hierarchy) and see that they are on the correct place, but their 
content is just gone (blank/empty). Fortunately stuff looks like what you 
expect in the browser.

I'm using Windows 7 x64, Eclipse - Juno Service Release 1, GWT 2.5, GWT 
Designer 3.1.2.

Original comment by Why...@gmail.com on 21 Aug 2013 at 4:23

[GoogleCodeExporter]

[deleted comment]

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Still nothing? Well, after updating Google Plugin and using its own (not 
standalone) version of GWT Designer I see completely empty panels less often 
but the image still lags behind on tab switching. The workaround is to press 
the preview button and then close the popup window. Designer window is then 
quickly refreshed and gets in sync with actually selected tab of TabLayoutPanel.

Eclipse Standard/SDK

Version: Kepler Release
Build id: 20130614-0229

Original comment by radioano...@gmail.com on 7 Oct 2013 at 4:05

[GoogleCodeExporter]

We're moving towards unbundling GWT Designer from GPE. That will help with some 
of the confusion that people see when they notice differences between the GPE 
version of GWT Designer, and the standalone version.

Original comment by rdayal@google.com on 14 Oct 2013 at 4:00