RIA Developer's Journal

This AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007 West session is based on Erick Audet's real-life experience using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) with a persistence layer handled by Sleepycat from Oracle. He will demonstrate how fast the response time can be when no middle tier persistence layer such as Hibernate is used and no SQL is needed. He will also show how easy the source code can be maintained when such a architecture is used. In comparison with Struts, this architecture does not use any configuration files and is platform independent and runs on any Java EE application server. Mixing AJAX and an MVC framework with a real Java object database is a powerful and promising architecture. During his time at Oracle, Erick developed strong skills in the extraction and transformation of unstructured data from multiple sources, and that experience and those skills are leveraged into this presentation.

Speaker Bio: Erick Audet received a bachelor of computer sciences and a master’s degree in data mining from Laval University in Quebec City, Canada. During is master’s, Erick published and presented many scientific studies. Amongst them the publication of Re engineering of Relational Databases for the Discoveries of Decision Support System Information Patterns. This thesis enabled Erick to work at Oracle Corporation in the OLAP group in Waltham, MA.

Google Helps Developers Build AJAX Apps in Java, Launches "Google Web Toolkit"
"Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don't speak browser quirks as a second language," says the characteristically bright and breezy Google website devoted to its new beta toolkit.

"Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process," the site continues. "You spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatabilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript's lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile."

The answer to this is, Google says, GWT:

"GWT lets you avoid many of these headaches while offering your users the same dynamic, standards-compliant experience. You write your front end in the Java programming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML."

Available completely free, Google Web Toolkit ships with a Java-to-JavaScript compiler and a special web browser that helps debug GWT applications. It's available - for non-commercial, commercial, and enterprise applications - in all countries and should work for most languages, Google says, though documentation is currently only available in U.S. English.

The company says that it is releasing GWT in beta "to get feedback from the developer community."

"We expect to update the GWT class libraries and development tools based on this feedback, and once we're confident that GWT developers are satisfied with the features and stability of the GWT tools, we'll remove the beta label. In the meantime, you should expect the APIs to change in upcoming versions of the product."

GWT is designed to run on systems that meet the following requirements:

• Java: Sun Java 2 Runtime Environment 1.4.2+
• Operating system: Windows XP, Windows 2000, or Linux w/ GTK+ 2.2.1+
• Hardware: ~100MB of free disk space, 512MB RAM
  
  

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