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June 2nd, 2008 Alex Moffat Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Damon, Austin and I went to Google IO in San Francisco last week, here are our impressions of the conference. Bear in mind we attended mainly the Google Web Toolkit sessions so that’s what I’m going to focus on. However, all the content is going to be on YouTube at some point soon and based on the GWT sessions I’ll be taking a look at most of the presentations. With that caveat, it was a great event, with good interesting content and in a nice venue. We all came back more impressed than ever by GWT and fired up to try some of the new things in release 1.5.
For the GWT sessions I think you needed to have some initial understanding to get the most out of them, there wasn’t an introduction to GWT session or a what’s new in 1.5 session and some of the topics were fairly advanced. Aside from the content itself what I especially liked was the emphasis on judging GWT by the quality of the end user experience of the applications built with it. Bruce Johnson talked several times about the GWT mission statement, it’s worth following the link to read the full explanation.
It was refreshing to hear someone introduce talks about a tool for developers by talking about the purpose of the tool, to build great applications. Too often tools and frameworks, especially frameworks, are all about the developer. Though in most cases good tools and frameworks lead to great apps sometimes you have to choose between an easier developer experience and a better user experience. The first step is to recognize that such a choice sometimes exists, the second to to choose wisely; I believe GWT does both.
We all were impressed by the explanations of the Java to JavaScript compilation process, as Damon says “not only does GWT produce good Javascript, but their compiler is smart enough to produce Javascript that performs better than what you would have likely written had you done it by hand.” I hope to put up a few simple examples of this in the next few weeks, it’s fascinating to see it in action.
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