Google plans to focus significantly on its Google Web Toolkit, among other
things, at its upcoming Google I/O developer conference at the end of May.
According to an April
22 blog post on the Google Code site, Google I/O will be rich with GWT
content, including a number of sessions on improving productivity and application
performance with GWT. In addition, there will be a number of external GWT
developers leading various sessions and taking part in the Developer Sandbox at
the conference.
A description of the Developer Sandbox on the Google I/O site said,
"The Developer Sandbox is a new addition to Google I/O. Comprised of
'pods'—demo station areas grouped by product theme—the Sandbox will feature a
wide range of developers who have built applications based on technologies and
products featured at Google I/O. Representing large and small companies,
individual developers, and a diverse group of apps, these developers will be on
hand at the Sandbox to demo their apps, answer questions, exchange ideas, and
meet you in person. Members of the Google product and engineering teams will
also be on hand."
A group of external GWT developers will be on hand to show what they are
working on along the GWT front. That group includes Red Hat's JBoss division,
Timefire, StudyBlue and Lombardi Blueprint.
For its part, JBoss will present at the Developer Sandbox and will discuss
some of the efforts JBoss and Red Hat have undertaken with Google. Indeed, Red
Hat developer communities such as the Fedora Project and jboss.org have
collaborated with Google on a number of developer initiatives over the years,
including Google Summer of Code, Hibernate Shards, integration with Drools and
the Seam Framework and Google Gadgets integration with JBoss Portal.
StudyBlue is an academic network that enables students to connect with each
other and offers study tools. StudyBlue's Website is built entirely with GWT.
According to StudyBlue, GWT allows for complete AJAX
(Asynchronous JavaScript and X M L) integration without sacrificing usability or
integration capabilities. StudyBlue will be at the Sandbox.
Timefire produces scalable, interactive visualizations of up to millions of
data points for business intelligence, analytics, finance, sensor networks and
other industries in what they refer to as "Google Maps, but for the time
dimension," said Christine Tsai, a member of the Google Developer Products
team in the April 22 blog post. "Their platform's built on Google Web
Toolkit from the ground up, but also runs natively on Android. Timefire also
uses App Engine's new Java language support for their social charting tool."
And Lombardi Blueprint is a cloud-based process discovery and documentation
platform accessible from any browser, Tsai said. "They've used GWT since
early 2007 to write the client side of Lombardi Blueprint. GWT has enabled
Lombardi to focus on writing and maintaining their Java code, while taking care
of creating the browser-specific optimized AJAX
for them."
In addition, Tsai listed what she called "one little known fact": that
Google has used GWT to help in the development of several Google products,
including Google Moderator, Health, Checkout, Image Labeler and Base.
The search giant released Version 1.6 of GWT on April 7 and included a
Google plug-in for the Eclipse open-source application platform and integration
with Google App Engine's Java language support.
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