We've got another guest blog post, this time from Russell Ivanovic, Software Developer at Groundhog Software. He's here to talk about his experience building a new product using GWT.
In 2006 Groundhog Software partnered with education specialists to deliver an electronic portfolio solution. As fate would have it, GWT was released by Google during the R&D phase of this project. Groundhog recognised that, even in its infancy (version 1.0), this was a product that could deliver the usability, scalability and ease of development that we needed. A proof of concept prototype was built successfully, and after funding was secured, full scale production began.
Today, Groundhog Software's solution ePo Builder is successfully deployed in a pilot of over 80 schools, catering for over 16,000+ users.
So what benefits did GWT bring to the table? Let's look at a few:
Our website has more information about ePo Builder and Groundhog Software.
We wanted to highlight another success story for GWT. Lombardi Software has created an innovative modeling tool called Blueprint that they recently built using GWT. Rather than having me tell the story, here are the details from Alex Moffat, Engineering Manger at Lombardi:
Lombardi Blueprint includes around 28,500 lines of our Java code that gets compiled to JavaScript by GWT. We think that's quite a lot but the largest page is 50% smaller, at 480K, than the less functional Dojo based prototype, and it was much easier to develop.
The challenge handed to us was to create a tool that the average business user could use to document and manage their business processes. It had to be easy to use, encourage collaboration between team members, and provide a shared repository for all of a company's process documentation. Workflow functionality had to be on par with our competitors: Microsoft Visio, IDS Scheer's ARIS, IBM's WebSphere Business Modeler, and other desktop modeling tools. But we also wanted wiki & shared whiteboard capabilities to store information. Editing should use the drag and drop interaction users of desktop apps are familiar with. We ended up with some additional features that really set us apart:
All that was a significant task for us to tackle and without GWT we wouldn't have accomplished it. It turned out that coding in JavaScript just wasn't an option for such a complex application. If you're developing a browser based app we'd highly recommend using GWT. And we've seen great success, with thousands of users in Fortune 500 companies around the world. And opposite the Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 concern, users actually pay for our app!
(see the larger video)
Back when we began developing Blueprint, we started with a combination of HTML and Flash 8 for the interactive parts. We ended up abandoning that fairly quickly for a couple of reasons:
Our next iteration was pure HTML and JavaScript using Dojo. This approach fixed the problems we had with Flash, but had its own issues:
Around that time, GWT 1.3 was released and we decided to take the plunge. Fortunately we didn't have to convert all of our JavaScript code to GWT at once. By using GWT's JSNI facilities, we were able to migrate areas gradually as we needed to make functional changes. Compared to our earlier efforts, GWT has allowed us to be far more productive and flexible. The big wins for us have been:
Line count comparisons between the Dojo and GWT based versions of Blueprint are invidious, not least because the GWT version of Blueprint includes much more functionality than the Dojo based one did. However, for our last Dojo based release we wrote around 8,500 lines of JavaScript, and at this point we've written 28,500 lines of Java code, excluding comments, which GWT compiles to JavaScript. There's no way we could have built the equivalent functionality using JavaScript, and as mentioned before the resulting downloads are still smaller.
Overall we believe GWT has enabled us to write a much more reliable and efficient application and build it faster than we could have otherwise. Since its release just 120 days ago, people in 60 countries have begun using Blueprint; this represents more than 750 companies and thousands of individuals. You can check it out for yourself and let us know what you think!
Over the summer we blogged about a conference dedicated to the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) that the folks at Pearson Education are planning. We're happy to announce that the agenda has been posted.
Voices That Matter: Google Web Toolkit will take place December 3-6, 2007 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The week kicks off on Monday, December 3rd, with (optional) preliminary workshops on JavaScript and AJAX development to prepare attendees for the rest of the week. Starting Tuesday morning, core conference sessions include:
In addition to the talks and panels, there will be several opportunities for more casual interactions with members of the GWT community, including the conference speakers. Nearly all of the GWT team will be speaking and participating in the conference including co-creators of GWT Bruce Johnson and Joel Webber. Feel free to check out the complete list of speakers.
Be sure to register before October 27th to receive the "early bird" discount. We'll see you there!
