GWT Now

There is a new drop of Tatami project available . Tatami is a GWT wrapper for a famous Dojo javascript library. It looks pretty neat with some newly added widgets: Grid, Spinners, MD5 hash library.

One thing however I don’t understand is the licensing for Tatami project – it’s LGPL – versus typical BSD that Dojo uses or Apache 2.0 license that GWT uses, especially considering the fact that LGPL is really a rather gray area as related to compiled code, such the one that GWT compiler produces.

good folks at Lombardi Software’s Blueprint team posted their review of the migration to GWT 1.5 and what it means to performance of their project. Here are some interesting nuggets from the post:

• …I was also surprised that converting longs to doubles made as big of an impact as it did.  We don’t have many usages of longs.  Most of them are a couple dozen timer instrumentation points but converting them made a noticeable difference.  The long emulation must be particularly slow…
• …I would say that this shows we’re getting around a 10% reduction in time with a simple upgrade from GWT 1.4 to 1.5 and even an improvement on the Diagram.  This is a simple win as far as we’re concerned….
• …The GWT compile time increased pretty dramatically from 55 seconds to 321 seconds which is almost six times longer.  I’m more than happy with the tradeoff between this and the new features we get with 1.5….
• …The generated OBF code increased in size.  We went from 673,876 bytes to 748,574 bytes (+11%) in uncompressed size on our largest module.  The total application is about 36,000 lines of GWT compiled code (excluding comments and whitespace) and that doesn’t include double counting lines that are reused in multiple modules…

“We recently ported the site http://brightpages.com from Struts to GWT. As others have experienced, we had quite a ride porting to GWT framework. Being a public website, we have had to deal with issues like making the site accessible to crawlers and minimize the network traffic. We still have some UI bits rendered from server as GWT’s dynamic UI is not crawlable. But most of the interactive bits turned out good with GWT.

The other issue we dealt with is the size of the javascript output by GWT. The way we got around it using deferred binding to output different JS per page and in some cases, per use case, while using the same GWT module. This bought the size of the uncompressed JS from over 400kb to less than 27kb. I know that the JS is cached by the browser, but the delay in first-time hit was not acceptable.

We tried to switch to GWT 1.5 but the compile time was making the process prohibitive. Looking forward to the final release of 1.5 and the community feedback.”

“Sasha Maps is a GWT-based library which provides functionality similar to the Google Maps API (its client side).”

http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Web-Toolkit/browse_thread/thread/914d027afd70f127#

just added a new page to cover examples of where GWT is used – GWT in the wild

I’ll keep this page up to date going forward with more examples, that hopefully will help you to get sold on GWT technology. Current list includes:

• a comprehensive thread on groups.google.com
• Lombari Blueprint
• Contact Office
• Google Base
• Google Health
• GwtApps (it’s an awesome book on GWT)
• Xscetch
• Compiere (ERP + CRM)
• Yesmail
• Alenty
• Awdio
• Riflethru

I just created this blog to cover various things related to Google Web Toolkit (GWT). I like the GWT technology, consider it a definite must for anyone looking into development of Rich Internet Applications (RIA), and believe in its future as a viable alternative in the still largely emerging web development arena.

I hope you find this blog useful in your development and technology research efforts.