GWT Now

Google announced availability of their Google App Engine for Java. GAE is a pretty interesting concept - developing apps tightly coupled to a cloud computing provider infrastructure. SalesForce Platform (Force.com) and a few other smaller upstarts are offering alternatives here, but google appears to be the first one to have an offering based on Java and apparent support for a multitude of open source java technologies.

I haven’t tried the Java GAE yet (looking forward to it in the next few weeks), however this SDK should certainly play nicely with GWT, which Google is hinting will be part of it. It’s certainly enticing to have an integrated web platform based on Java with built-in robust Ajax framework and scalability of Google cloud computing infrastructure.

Can’t wait for Maven support for Java GAE with GWT.

Update: GWT is part of GAE Eclipse plugin. Nicely done.

Darrell at ExtJs/ExtGWT published a set of screenshots from the upcoming release of Ext GWT (2.0). I don’t know about usefulness of the MsOffice-ish Ribbon Toolbar, but there are some new layouts and components that make Ext GWT 2.0 quite close to the ExtJs 2.x library in terms of features.  

On a side note, I’ve been writing quite a bit of javascript recently (jQuery and ExtJs) for a change and already miss GWT and the value of GWT and component frameworks on top of it like ExtGWT/SmartGWT. Javascript is certainly powerful, flexible, and fun to write code in, however I really appreciate GWT due its native tendancy for development of better organized and thus maintainable code - an indispensable trait for large projects.

Darrell at Extjs announced a new patch build of Ext GWT - 1.2.3.  Besides fixing a bunch of bugs, one notable change is “Significant performance enhancements around layouts.”

I gave a try to the Ext GWT explorer demo and does in fact now feel significantly faster (it seems to be in my experience 1.5x - 2x times improvement in Firefox and Chrome). Those that are still using IE6 (get rid of it already! it’s 2009 after all) will still be out of luck, but who cares

Folks at SmartClient/Isomorphic have published a new skin for the library which looks quite nicely. Below is the eye candy from the latest compiled SmartGWT build - looks pretty sharp.

I’ve been watching over the past few months the progress of the ftr-gwt-library, which is basically striving to become “Google look a like Week calender”.  I’d say they are getting closer to their goal with every month passing by.

Decided to pay a little bit more attention to this blog and moved it over from overly restricted wordpress.com to beluehost and updated the look and feel in the process.

There is apparently soon going to be a livegrid implementation for GXT/Ext-GWT, similar to the one that exists for ExtJs, SmartClient/SmartGWT, and ItMill. There is already a demo and all (no source or anything else) - but worth checking out out anyway. And the announcement.

I personally have no idea whether paging is better than live grids for usability - none of the rich UI desktop systems I’ve worked on used paging (10000 or even 100000 rows is not too bad for the user if responsiveness is good and sorting/drilling is organized well), however none of the web apps I’ve developed or used had more than 200 rows per “page”.  I think the key is in the UI organization around the grid and visual responsiveness of components…

I’m sure by now the news of the new GWT widget framework - SmartGWT - has reached developer circles. Sanjiv has done a great job bringing out yet another great javascript framework to the java/GWT development world.

There is now also a little portal example that is getting integrated into SmartClient and SmartGWT - here is the forum post announcement and the demo after the break.

oh, yeah - GXT 1.2  is out - choke full of new goodies (mostly around Drag and Drop), grid data binding, bug fixes etc. Don’t know about you, but it seems to feel a little snappier with this release, at least on the few individual examples I tried…

Back from blogging hiatus. Rejoice my fellow geeks! Asynchronous java(script) loading is now part of GWT trunk - post 1.6 it seems. The r3901 merge has done it, and you can now fearlessly start hacking your way through this very early, although looking pretty mature feature. It’s now time to whip out all all of your 1Mb+ GWT modules and break them apart into a thousand 1K pieces
what does the code look like you might ask? Here you go:

GWT.runAsync(new RunAsyncCallback() {

public void onFailure(Throwable caught) {
callback.onFailure(caught);
}

public void onSuccess() {
callback.onSuccess(onInitialize());
}
});

where onInitialize() can have whatever your complex nature desires.

Haven’t tried this particular build yet, but looking forward to, in a few days.