Chat with Bruce Johnson

Dietrich Kappe, Tuesday, December 4, 2007 @ 7:28 pm

My cell is on East Coast time, my body on Central Time, and the conference on Pacific Time, so I just caught the tail end of this press gaggle. Interesting the questions you get from the mainstream journalists versus the technical bloggers. Bruce said a lot, even in the short time I was there, but here are the highlights:

• While Ajax apps may be pushing the browser to its limits, GWT makes parsimonious use of resources and doesn't exhibit browser crap-out issues.
• The GWT team is tracking the roadmap of the various browsers, but so far the only new feature slated for inclusion is a SVG/Canvas solutiuon.
• Java 1.5-isms are slated for GWT 1.5. In fact, if you checkout and build the current trunk in SVN, you will get generics, etc. No more compiling server and client side code separately.
• Their goal is to have the GWT compiler produce better code than a JavaScript expert can write by hand. Better in terms of performance, I assume. If you know the history of assembly language and compilers, this seems doable.
• There is a gleam in the GWT teams eyes to let the hosted mode browser be pluggable, i.e. you can link and run against Opera if you like. This is off a ways, but very cool.
• Yes, GWT-RPC should be easier to do (think ActiveRecord and Rails). Definitely on the radar.
• Yes, GWT is a leaky abstraction over the HTML/CSS/JavaScript thang, but intentionally so. The Web has been successful, so why try to abstract it out completely?

I caught the end of Kelly Norton's usability talk. Again, seemed like more of a general Ajax + usability talk rather than GWT specific. Given that my company makes its money on the integration of Agile + UXD, I am very bought into the importance of usability. One of the main thrusts was that response time is key. If the app responds in less than 0.1 seconds, it is regarded as being instantaneous. If you've replaced the 5 second web 1.0 postback with lots of 0.5 second XHR requests, then your app will suck, usability wise.

Technorati Tags: ajax, gwt, usability

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