Themes in GWT

As a Google junky, we tend to prefer Google products over competitors if we can help it. Therefore when faced with a need to learn a website creation package preferably based in Java, we inevitably learned to use GWT. GWT is a brilliant software which allows you to write web apps with the ease of Java and many of its libraries, and compile them into fast, obfuscated, and optimised Javascript for every browser. Google Wave runs on GWT. Unfortunately, the real brilliance of the toolkit lies in the compiler and the development tools and hooks. Unfortunately, they have completely neglected the CSS skinning of the toolkit, and generally leave it up to developers to hire their own CSS designers. There are only 3 primary themes built into the toolkit, and they all look amateurish. Instantiations makes a tool, GWT Designer, which allows WYSIWYG manipulation to help design GWT based pages. This can speed in basic layout development and simple colour and font manipulations, but you pay for it with awkward, ugly, and verbose Java code you then have to manually clean up later. If you know Java and the GWT library well, it is almost worth it just to skip GWT Designer entirely. That said, we fully respect and have been impressed by the features of GWT Designer.

To help developers make compelling apps and websites and perhaps to stimulate interest in GWT, we encourage Google to devote more resources to design, themes, and templates for GWT. What do other GWT developers think?

GWT Conference

In December of 2007, I attended the Voices that Matter: Google Web Toolkit conference in San Francisco. This was my first professional technical conference and I found it a very valuable experience. I had only been coding webpages for a year since discovering this technology. I was all at once surrounded by all the developers and experts who could answer all my questions and teach me so much more besides.

I was particularly interested to meet the engineers from Google, the company that fascinates me, gives me hope, inspiration, and a little envy. They were all brilliant, nerdy people as I suspected, deserving to work for the top firm in the world. All of my hopes for Google as a benevolent and beneficent force in society were strengthened and confirmed by the conference. If I have not said enough already about it, this technology is wonderful for any java developer looking to develop a web application. I have developed front-end database applications with this, basic marketing websites, and furthermore have developed a financial trading application with it, all in java with no knowledge of javascript or DOM.

I commend the Palace Hotel for hosting the conference and Prentice Hall and Addison-Wesley for doing a magnificent job organising and filming the conference. All the videos from every session are freely available on youtube.

Furthermore, given the wonderful time I had seeing friends and relatives in the area, I am all the more convinced that the Bay Area as the capital of technology is a good place for a person like me to establish myself. It has a horribly lacking transportation system unfortunately, but adequate enough if you have 2 hours to get from A to B. European engineers ought to redesign the entire infrastructure.

Robert Hanson on Intellectual Property

Robert Hanson, GWT developer and author of the well regarded guide GWT in Action, has a great new post on his blog. He shares the practical viewpoint with the rest of the rational and uncorrupted world that piracy is generally a good and inevitable phenomenon and that Open Source is generally the best model to develop software not just in the aggregate, but also for specific customers. He rightly chastises those who follow the closed-source model of development. Furthermore this post explains the usefulness to Java developers of the JAD Eclipse plugin. Since Hanson praises piracy, it is worth noting that his book is available on several torrent networks.

GWT

As announced in November, I have spent significant time this year programming fairly advanced webpages using the Google Web Toolkit. The toolkit was released spring of 2006. It features not a Java wrapper for Javascript as previously stated, but rather a full compiler which translates Java code resembling the Swing graphical interface package to pure Javascript. Google currently uses the toolkit to make services such as Google Groups and Picasa Web Albums although some of their most sophisticated services such as Gmail, iGoogle, and Docs and Spreadsheets still relies on low level Javascript.

I Cringely recently predicted that Javascript toolkits, especially GWT, would become the standard not just for web development, but especially and more immediately for applications designed to run securely on mobile devices such as the iPhone. Apple's recent move to open Safari to Windows (especially in a very broken condition) was a well thought out strategic move to encourage Javascript programmers to begin supporting Apple's proprietary web browser. The GWT connection comes from the fact that Google has put significant effort in ensuring that GWT compiled JS functions on all major browsers since most browsers process JS differently and often fail as a result. At the same time, Google is making concessions to Apple in making YouTube videos available in Apple format.

Let me pause and say that for all of its impressive strengths, Apple's critical weakness comes from its obsession with its own closed platforms and formats.

Back to GWT. I am honoured that the GWT news site, onGWT has on my recommendation posted the link to the Cringely article. onGWT is the best site available for the latest news and resources for GWT.