This talk follows the Google Wave team’s experience building the Google Wave client using Google Web Toolkit (GWT). We’ll cover some recent advances in GWT which enabled Google Wave to look and feel like a desktop application with comparable performance. In addition, we will discuss the use of WebDriver (an automated web testing tool) which is integral to the project’s success.

Download session presentation PDF.

A presentation of Google Web Toolkit 1.4. This toolkit that brought you Gmail and Google Maps will please programmers who like Java Swing.

In the early days of Java, application development with the Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT) was relatively simple. You needed a decent understanding of Java and AWT fundamentals, but once equipped with such knowledge you could dive in and develop some impressive applications in a short amount of time. Ten years later, we have, in so many respects, gone significantly backwards. We’ve shoehorned technologies such as HTML into shoes for which they were never intended, and for our efforts, we have a mismatch of disparate technologies …

As Joel Webber says, “The fastest HTTP requests are those which do not, in fact, occur.” GWT really takes this principle to heart. It turns out that GWT’s compilation process provides the perfect opportunity to smush, pack, tweak, and jimmy the various types of resources needed in an Ajax application. Image bundles can reduce the number of image fetches by an order of magnitude. Style injection can automatically minify your CSS and inline background images as “data:” URLs. The Gadget linker automatically creates a …

What do you do when you want the benefits of modularity and abstraction during development, but you aren’t willing to subject users with any runtime overhead to get it? If you’re the GWT team, you invent deferred binding. Deferred binding is a pluggable compile-time type substitution and code generation mechanism. This unique approach to program modularization provides many of the benefits of Java reflection and dynamic class loading without compromising the GWT compiler’s ability to optimize the heck out of your code.

The real world experience building Lombardi Blueprint is used as a case study to introduce the use of GWT, why it was successful and why it has become the platform of choice for other Lombardi products. One goal of the presentation is to argue for the use of GWT as the foundation for RIA development.
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Alex-Moffat-GWT-Blueprint

We all want to be able to deliver reliable applications to our customers, but how can we do that in the face of Ajax? Each browser has its own unique bugs, quirks, and performance characteristics. Learn how GWT’s unique support for JUnit can help you squash bugs before they make it to your users. This session covers the entire gamut of testing, from basic test writing and execution, to asynchronous testing, and parallel remote web execution. Additionally, we’ll tackle the use of benchmarking to improve your application performance, prevent regressions, …

This is the 9th episode of Drunk On Software, where we sit down with Alex Moffat of Lombardi Software to discuss their usage of Google Web Toolkit (GWT). Alex shares an overview of GWT, and discuss his hands-on experience of using GWT on the development of Lombardi Blueprint product.

Building high-performance Ajax easily with Google Web Toolkit (GWT) in Eclipse has always been possible, but soon it will be downright easy. Bruce Johnson from Google present s GWT’s upcoming Eclipse plugin that helps novices get started and lets experts fly.

It’s a rare Ajax application that doesn’t need network access. To the despair of many a developer, though, there are almost as many ways of communicating with a server as there are servers. The usual alphabet soup applies (XML, JSON, SOAP, RPC, and others) but even once you pick one, you’re really just getting started. Designing your services for scalability and performance is an art in itself, regardless of which format you choose to represent your data. Fortunately, a few of us have lived …