The results have been tabulated and the winners are in! In Round II of the Last Call for Google I/O GWT contest, we asked contestants to implement a countdown clock in GWT similar to the official Google I/O countdown and received 48 entries from the US (regrettably, other countries were ineligible due to contest legal requirements).
The three judges from the GWT team were very impressed with the overall creativity and productivity of the participants, with one of the winning entries coming in only seven hours into the 24-hr contest. We selected the top 10 entries based on originality, visual appeal, and performance, and used the size of the compiled Javascript as a tie-breaker in close calls. Here are a few of the judges' favorites:
Nine of our ten contest winners provided a little info about themselves, so in no particular order, here they are. Congratulations to all!
Towers of Hanoi Christopher Troup Santa Monica, CA, USA / Halifax, NS, Canada GWT experience: 2 years Web Application Developer for SheepDogInc.ca. We use GWT in lots of ways ranging from full-scale GWT applications to progressive enhancement layers over traditional web applications.
Conveyer Belt Pierre Coirier Boston, MA, USA GWT experience: 3 years Lead front-end developer at Xplana, working on new student learning platform that bridges social networking and the traditional elements of education (http://www.xplana.com), creator of Mvp4g (MVP/Event bus framework for GWT)
Whac-a-Droid Brad Rydzewski Scottsdale, AZ, USA GWT experience: 3 years I'm a technology product manager at a large corporation during the day ... and enjoy caffeine-fueled nights working on my open source projects gwt-cal, gwt-touch and a gwt nintendo emulator
Breakout [Editor's note: move the mouse to play] Brian Reilly Cambridge, MA, USA GWT experience: 20 months Software developer for a biomedical research institution using GWT to develop applications to track DNA sequencing projects.
Morph Yi Yang Edmonton, AB, Canada GWT experience: 1.5 years Software developer for a local startup (CorpAv Inc.). We build awesome flight-scheduling software with awesome GWT technologies. We built our application entirely on pure GWT without using any third-party UI library (e.g. Ext-Gwt, SmartGwt) and managed to make it visually-appealing and user-friendly.
Word pixels John Ho Boston, MA, USA GWT experience: 2 years Web applications developer in the education software field. Our UI team primarily uses GWT for development.
Domino clock James Wendel Austin, TX, USA GWT experience: 2 years Software developer for a network security company. Have used GWT to create small utilities for personal websites. I started out as a Java UI developer and moved into web application development with GWT. Source code: http://code.google.com/p/oldclock/
Jumping for Droids [Editor's note: move your mouse over the developers to excite them by directing Androids their way] Tom Burke Scottsdale, AZ, USA GWT experience: 2 years Developer at a large Dilbert-style corporation in the finance industry. Been using GWT a little bit at work, and quite a lot on hobby projects.
Transitions Andy Keller Grand Rapids, MI, USA GWT experience: 2 years I'm the Director of Engineering at Traction Software, Inc. where we make collaboration software for business. Starting 2 years ago we re-implemented our entire interface using GWT and have shared some of our work in the gwt-traction project. We're huge fans of GWT. Source code: http://code.google.com/p/pulazzo-lastcall/
Floor physics [Editor's note: draw a line with the mouse under the clock and see the balls react] Chi Hoang USA GWT experience: 3 years I'm the Chief Architect at Solium Capital, a leading provider of stock plan administration technology and services. A rapidly increasing portion of the front end of our web based application is implemented in GWT.
Thanks again to all who participated!
We’re not going to be shy about this, the GWT team loves tools and APIs that make developers' lives better. That’s why we’re happy to have reached an important milestone within the GWT 2.3 release, and are making the GWT 2.3 Beta available for public preview today. This release focuses on bringing Google Services and APIs directly into the Eclipse IDE, making it easier than ever to build fantastic apps using the GWT SDK and Google Plugin for Eclipse (GPE).
Easy Discovery and Access to Google APIs The number of new APIs hosted by Google has been on the rise lately, and we think this is great for developers looking to add cool features to their apps, such as Google Maps overlays, Buzz streams, and Google Docs integration. To help developers build out these features, we’ve added the ability to browse and add Google APIs directly from Eclipse. Simply highlight a project and the select the “Google - Add Google APIs” menu item to get started.
Import Projects from Project Hosting What developer tool would be cloud-enabled if it didn’t allow you to store your source code in the cloud? GPE 2.3 provides a simple UI that makes importing projects, from Project Hosting, into Eclipse a piece of cake. We’ve been eating our own dogfood for years, with Project Hosting being the home for GWT source, issue, tracking, wikis, and downloads, so we’re particularly excited to see this functionality within GPE.
One Login, Many Services As we’ve increased the breadth of services that GPE is communicating with, we wanted to make sure that the user experience remained streamlined. To do so, we’ve included an option to specify your Google Account information only once (using the same authentication mechanisms as Gmail and Google Docs), and deploy to App Engine and import projects from Project Hosting as many times as necessary.
Local Storage APIs One of the key differentiators between legacy desktop apps and modern web apps is their ability to access data quickly and continue to be usable offline. With the GWT 2.3 SDK we’ve included support for accessing Web Storage, leveling the playing field by allowing web apps to store and retrieve data locally. This is not only faster than typical RPCs, but more functional too, as it allows the app to access data even when there is no Internet connection.
Along with this new set of features and functionality, we have a handful of issue fixes such as updated IE9 support and better iFrame loading within Internet Explorer. The full list of fixes can be found within the GWT issue tracker.
If you're looking to get started, the Google Plugin for Eclipse, as well as other developer tools, can be downloaded here.
As always, if you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it and the GWT Groups is the right place to submit it.
Posted by Chris Ramsdale, cramsdale@google.com
