Google Web Toolkit News - onGWT.com

Andrew Bowers :

Recently I was shown a demo of Seesmic Web, an application that lets you manage multiple streams and Twitter accounts. The demo was very cool and notable because Seesmic's related product is Seesmic Desktop, implemented in Adobe Air. Seesmic Web replicates the desktop functionality, but on the web using GWT.

The team chose GWT to build Seesmic Web, and I was curious to hear about their experience. In case it helps others in the process of evaluating GWT for building web apps, here is the response I got back from Johann Romefort, CTO at Seesmic.

My friend Jérome Louvel will like this quote from Johann Romefort :

I guess one area of departure is that we did not follow the classical RPC way for our server-side interactions. Instead, we built a REST API to keep our back-end services agnostic from the client used. We’re using Restlets to interact with our REST API, which once again worked flawlessly, as expected.

Seesmic duplicates their Adobe Air interface on the web with GWT

Jules White

Gwigo  is a new social mapping site built on top of GWT and Google App Engine. Gwigo allows users to mark their
favorite restaurants, shopping locations, and places to see on a map. These map points can be shared with a user's Facebook or GMail social
network, allowing users to browse through each other's favorite places. If you want to go get something to eat, you can lookup the 3
closest restaurants marked by your best friend. Are you going to a city that a friend went to last year? Look at her Gwigo map to see
what were the favorite spots she visited.
The front end of Gwigo is written in Java and compiled into javascript using GWT. The backend is written in Python and runs on Google App
Engine. The GWT Google Maps API is used along with the Python version of the Google Data API.

http://www.gwigo.com

Richard Hightower :

This second part of a three-part introduction to Google App Engine for Java has introduced you to the process of creating a custom GWT application using the Eclipse plugin tools for App Engine for Java. In building the simple contact-management application, you've learned how to:

• Build remote services that work asynchronously
• Organize GUI code to avoid nested inner class declarations
• Utilize GWT to implement functionality for two key use cases

SpringSource.com :

Together, VMware and SpringSource plan to further innovate and develop integrated Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions that can be hosted at customer datacenters or at cloud service providers.  These solutions will allow customers to rapidly build new enterprise and web applications and run and manage these applications in the same dynamic, scalable and cost-efficient vSphere-based internal or external clouds that can also host and manage their existing applications, providing an evolutionary path to the future.

Good news for GWT which is PaaS compatible : server stateless and very low server CPU consumption

VMware to Acquire SpringSource

Christopher Blizzard

Unlike the year that passed between Firefox 3 and Firefox 3.5, we expect that this 3.6 release will be released in a small number of months. Our main focus for the 3.6 release will be end-user perceived performance, TraceMonkey and DOM performance and new web developer features.

And remenber, browsers are our webOS, and as web application developers we need to track new versions. But thanks to GWT, things are much easier now.

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/08/firefox-36a1-for-developers/

eishay.com :

If you wish to use GWT for the front end and still use Scala for the back end - no problems. You write your GWT code with Java, write the GWT service interface with Java so the GWT compiler will be happy, and implement the service with Scala. The service implementation is hooked up with GWT in the web.xml as the http end point.

Scala on Google App Engine playing it nice with Java GWT and JDO

Google Testing Blog :

Because GWT (Google Web Toolkit) is new and exciting it's easy to forget the lessons on clean GUI code structure that have been accumulated over nearly thirty years.

GwtTest is good for testing UI-specific code in JavaScript. If you find yourself using GwtTest for testing non-ui client-side logic you may not have a clear View/Presenter separation. Separating the View and the Presenter allows for more modular, more easily tested code with shorter test times. Model View Presenter was introduced in another episode back in February. Here's how to apply it to a GWT app.

TotT : Testing GWT without GwtTest

Clay Lenhart :

GWT is a very flexible environment that allows you to write a web application in Java and compile it to Javascript -- even for the iPhone.

A number of people have fears with GWT, for instance

• (not true) GWT isn't flexible which will lead developers down a dead-end path.
• (not true) GWT is ugly, and can't be used to make "gucci" UIs.

This post will show that these are just myths.

"Clay Lenhart's Blog : A blog on .Net and SQL Server" ;-)

nicklothian.com :

The scenario: A typical meeting, they want to pop up our search screen, select an item and have it post back via Javascript the selected item. “Sure, no problem” I say. “Can you do cross domain Javascript like that” their dev asks, and I think for a second about all the IFrame proxy hacks I’ve seen and say “yeah, no problems”.

Cross domain, cross window Javascript communication

Source : http://twitter.com/dalmaer/status/3174821278