Noticed that no one answered this, looking for something else. If you look at the SmartGWT storefront, they will have a pop-up window displayed during application loading. In my application, I turned on the mechanism there, and you just need to add this to your webapp.html:
as part <head>
<style type="text/css">
body { overflow:hidden }
#loading {
border: 1px solid #ccc;
position: absolute;
left: 45%;
top: 40%;
padding: 2px;
z-index: 20001;
height: auto;
}
#loading a {
color: #225588;
}
#loading .loadingIndicator {
background: white;
font: bold 13px tahoma, arial, helvetica;
padding: 10px;
margin: 0;
height: auto;
color: #444;
}
#loadingMsg {
font: normal 10px arial, tahoma, sans-serif;
}
</style>
<body> script, WebApp.nocache.js:
<div id="loadingWrapper">
<div id="loading">
<div class="loadingIndicator">
<img src="WebApp/sc/skins/EnterpriseBlue/images/loading.gif" width="16" height="16" style="margin-right:8px;float:left;vertical-align:top;"/>WebApp<br/>
<span id="loadingMsg">Loading styles and images...</span></div>
</div>
</div>
<script type="text/javascript">document.getElementById('loadingMsg').innerHTML = 'Loading skin...';</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
document.write("<"+"script src=WebApp/sc/skins/EnterpriseBlue/load_skin.js isc_version=7.1.js><"+"/script>");
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">document.getElementById('loadingMsg').innerHTML = 'Loading Application<br>Please wait...';</script>