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