a couple of GWT calendar projects – gwt-scheduler and gwtsimiletimeline

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.

gwtapps – desktop and messenger examples

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.

Ext-GWT (GXT) releases preview of new Grid widget

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

GWT is going non-monolithic (runAsync)

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!

GWT compiler is getting parallel (and faster)…

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.

added “GWT in the wild” page

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

welcome

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.