Adam Houghton: GWT Conference Wrap-up

Currently writing about GWT, Ajax, Leopard, iPhone Development, and Java.

GWT Conference Wrap-up

Sunday, December 16, 2007

I had a great time at the Voices That Matter: Google Web Toolkit conference. Many thanks to Barbara Gavin at Pearson for organizing the event.

The highlight of the week was moderating Wednesday afternoon's GWT Tools Panel. We had a great group of panelists on stage to discuss widget libraries, components, and IDE plugins (pretty much anything to make a GWT developers' life easier):

Eric Clayberg - Instantiations GWT Designer
Ray Cromwell - Chronoscope visualization, charting, and vector graphics framework
Robert Hanson - gwt-widget library & gwt-server library, author of GWT In Action
Fred Sauer - gwt-dnd (Drag & Drop), gwt-voices (Sound), gwt-log (Logging), gwt-game (Game engine)

We had great questions from the audience, and the panelists got to share their passion for technology and helping developers.

Selected quotes from the week's sessions:

"Fast is better than slow is an understatement when switching costs are low." Bruce Johnson, A Business Case for GWT
"It's not that the dog talks beautifully, it's that the dog talks!" Josh Bloch on Ajax
"Techniques you use to build a hut are not the same techniques you use to build a skyscraper. If you try to turn a hut into a skyscraper, it will probably fall down." Josh Bloch on the benefits of static typing and GWT
"Turn on GZIP compression - gPokr went from 250kb to 70kb." Ryan Dewsbury, Deployment Best Practices
"HTTP requests are the slowest thing you'll ever do in a browser." Joel Webber, GWT Performance
"Fastest code is that which never executes." Joel Webber, GWT Performance
"Graphic design derives from use, not from making things look pretty." Kelly Norton, GWT Usability
"Keep the user interface stable. If it's moving around, that's bad." Kelly Norton, GWT Usability
"This is Ajax Baby!" David Geary, GWT Cool & Useful Stuff
"Deferred Binding allows resources to be baked into crunched-down, streamlined versions." Ray Cromwell, Deferred Binding
"GWT libraries are value-add, not magic." Bruce Johnson, A Tour of GWT Libraries
"The optimization is not pre-mature if it's about to affect hundreds of thousands of people." Joel Webber, Best Practices for Building Libraries
"Design to real use cases, not someone's dreamscape." Kelly Norton, Best Practices for Building Libraries

As others have mentioned, it was amazing to see the applications created in the last year based on GWT. The technology is really moving the bar for what's possible in a web application. I can't imagine what they'll be demoing next year...

Labels: Ajax, GWT, Java

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