thejavajar

I will be presenting, “Looking at the Google Web Toolkit”, at the Sarasota JUG on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008. It will basically be an intro to GWT, as I am not an expert. We will be looking at what the Google Web Toolkit offers to Java developers and how we might be able to leverage this tool in our Java Web development environments. Here is the presentation abstract:

In this session we will walk through the features of the Google Web Toolkit from a Java developer’s perspective. From installation to application development and deployment, we will see how the Google Web Toolkit can help Java developers get work done. Google Web Toolkit takes our Java code and produces HTML and JavaScript to create a fully functioning Web 2.0/AJAX based Web application. We will discuss problems encountered when developing AJAX Web applications for cross browser support and how the Google Web Toolkit has solved our problems. Of course, we will also look at some code and we will see what it takes to create our own Java Web application with the Google Web Toolkit.

The presentation materials will be online after the presentation and more information can be found at the Sarasota JUG’s site, www.sunjug.org.

I currently have taken down SWCM with the move to my new ISP hosting environment, but I will be re-factoring it for a client in the near future and should have a demo up sometime in April or May.

I attended the 2008 2GX software symposium in Reston, VA and I have definitely decided to use Groovy/Grails to develop Tangerine. I have been tossing and turning over the decision that I made a few months back to use Groovy/Grails, but now I really have some confidence in my decision. I have to re-factor my current code base a bit, but that should only take a month. I had originally intended to have Tangerine’s Product Manager out by the end of February but it looks like it will be in Beta by the end of March or mid April, with Sales Manager and Account Manager soon to follow.

I do not know where to start. 2GX was an incredible event that really sparked my interest in Groovy, Grails, Open Source development, and my passion for technology. First, Jay Zimmerman and the No Fluff Just Stuff staff and presenters really did a great job putting on an impressive event. The organization and setup of 2GX left you only worrying about one thing, attending the conference and getting as much out of it as you could. I basically didn’t have to leave the hotel and I barely slept at night(less than 4 hours each night). If there would have been presentations or BOF until 12am, I would have probably been there.

What I have taken from the conference or software symposium is that Groovy/Grails is not just a quick fix for Java Web development. With the power of ExandoMetaClass (create synthetic methods/properties), Duck Typing(walks like a duck, quacks like a duck: it is a duck), and static typing support inherited from Java, Groovy is the next generation of Java. In fact, the “next generation of Java” phrase came up quite frequently at 2GX. I think I have decided that would be the way to introduce and approach management and stakeholders with the power of Groovy.

Grails is not just another Web framework. It actually relies on Spring’s Webflow to handle the MVC pattern and Grails really is a development platform that “sits on the shoulders of giants” -Scott Davis, like Spring, Hibernate, and Quartz. The power of Grails is coding by convention but it also has the integration with proven technologies like Spring and Hibernate that force you to answer, why re-invent the wheel? Throw in Grails’ plug-in framework and you have modular and component based code that makes maintenance and releases have less impact on your enterprise software stack. The power of Java is platform independence and flexibility which has always driven my interest in Java. Now we have Groovy and Grails which can take advantage of everything we know and love in Java, like the hundreds of libraries already handling everything from logging to persistence, and include a very dynamic and flexible approach to what we have done in the past with fewer lines of code.