GWT Now

There is now a wrapper project hosted on Google Code for the Open Flash Charts 2. Open Flash Charts is just what it says is – an open source flash charting library, and quite slick looking I might add. And the GWT wrapper is : “The OFCGWT project provides a simple to use chart widget for GWT based on Open Flash Chart 2. It uses a heavily modified POJO bean model from OFC4J that is serialized using GWT JSON to provide the correct GWT Client data that meets the requirements of the OFC 2.x API. A beta version is available for early developer testing.”

And here is the link to the announcement on the GXT forums and here is a screen shot

“GWT 1.5 RC2 includes a number of enhancements and fixes above and beyond those included in the first release candidate. Please see the release notes included in the installation archive for details.”

Read more here and here or just download it here

“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#

Available under http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit/downloads/list

“This release candidate includes a number of enhancements and fixes above and beyond those included in the first release candidate. Please see the release notes included in the installation archive for details. We will be updating the public documentation and posting further details on the Google Web Toolkit blog soon:

http://googlewebtoolkit.blogspot.com/

We’re eager to get everyone’s feedback, so please try it out!”

I just looked over the list of gwt projects hosted on code.google.com and found a couple of quite interesting calendar projects that were recently updated for GWT 1.5 – gwt-scheduler and gwtsimiletimeline.

gwt-scheduler is a pretty neat GWT-based calendar implementation, with a couple of calendar views (month&week) & simple scheduling ability.

gwtsimiletimeline is a GWT wrapper around MIT’s simile-widets project‘s Timeline widget. The widget is quite stunning in its timeline/calendard visualization abilities using javascript. Simile-Widgets project also has a very cool timeplot widget – hopefully someone would provide a GWT wrapper for it at some point as well.

I really like the GWT Apps book by Ryan Dewsbury – I’m probably not alone in thinking that it’s the best book out there for any GUI developer looking to familiarize him/herself with GWT and the world of Rich Internet Applications development. The book is choke-full of various basic as well as advanced examples. The two that I personally find very useful are the Desktop (or rather a light-weight GWT portal) example and the high-performance remote event queuing Messenger implementation. The examples and the book are for the latest production release of GWT – 1.4 – but the source code is actually very easily migratable to 1.5 (it was really breeze when I did this for some of my own needs). If you’d like to try it yourself, I found that the source code for all examples in the book is available in files section of GwtApps’ google group.

Darrell from ExtJs just released a preview of the new Grid component that will be part of Ext-GWT (GXT) v.1.1. Here are the previews of various grid views and an implementation of editable grid. More details on the implementation plans for the Grid component are here

There have been many discussions on GWT forums about the monolithic nature of javascript produced by GWT’s java-to-javascript compiler (typical GWT compilation output consists of a single .js file produced for every major browser). Although this certainly is a tried-and-true approach in GWT for improving performance, many developers of large GWT-based projects would like to have the flexibility to partition their applications and load their parts dynamically at runtime. It looks like Google WebToolkit team is making great progress in implementing this exact functionality in a future release. I noticed this branch (called runAsync) within GWT trunk. And here is sneak peak at how it may look like in the code:

AsyncCallback<MyBigCompositeWidet> callback= new AsyncCallback<MyBigCompositeWidet>() {
public void onFailure(Throwable caught) {
// TODO Auto-generated method stub
}

public void onSuccess(MyBigCompositeWidet result) {

result.setVisible(false);
}
};

GWT.createAsync(MyBigCompositeWidet.class, callback)

Pretty Slick!

Google guys are gearing up to include much desired parallelization features into the GWT compiler. The feature is still really rough and only exists as a patch, but results are very promising. According to some folks who tried the patch the compilation time drops dramatically (40-50%) on the multicore workstations.

E.g. Showcase:
Before: (0:02:04.754)
After: (0:01:03.398)

Read more in this forum thread.