GWT Conference: Final Q&A

Dietrich Kappe, Thursday, December 6, 2007 @ 2:45 pm

Just a sampling of some of the Q&A:

• Q: What is the direction of the ability to index (search) pages created by GWT? A: It's a hard problem, sort of like indexing a Flash App.
• Q: Do you foresee building Android Apps with GWT? A: Ray Cromwell is working on making GWT work in Android (don't use widgets, just JRE). See Ray's blog.
• Q: How do you decide to prioritize feature requests? A: In the issue tracker, there is an ability to vote for features. More priority is given to things that effect a lot of people. Also, contribute to the things that matter to you in the incubator.
• Q: How does implementation inheritance fit into the design of GWT? A: We aren't a religious bunch in terms of design (except user experience). As soon as you design something that can be subclassed, the arguments about private, protected, etc., start. It's more trouble than it's worth. GWT is a pragmatic framework. Let's not confuse getting stuff done with over-architecting the solution. The answer to this is Interfaces (HasText, HasHTML) and helper objects.
• Q: 1.4 had a ton of stuff in it, 1.5 as well. Will you try to move to quicker, smaller releases? A: Quarterly is our goal with a few (two?) milestone builds in between.
• Q: What is the progress on Firefox 3? A: There is one big problem with FF3: has gotten more restrictive about adding DOM nodes to a document. Would affect you if you had written JavaScript by hand as well, only you would grep for appendChild() for the bugs.
• Q: How stable will the DOM structure of Widgets be (for CSS writers)? A: If they have CSS names, it is stable, if they don't, they're not.
• A call to fix the mistakes rather than being infinitely backward compatible.
• Q: Could GWT be used to build distributed computing environments? A: Interesting idea if you are willing to live with the limitations of the the browser (fuzzy numeric calculations, etc.). Try it.
• Bruce J Question: If we created collections for GWT that are more efficient (and provided them alongside the existing Collections classes), would people use that.
• Q: It seems I add styling to everything. Is this typical? A: It seems to be pretty typical (but also typical of other HTML development outside of GWT). ImmutableResourceBundle will allow programmatic access to stuff like CSS (in incubator). Should make resource problems easier and speeds things up.
• Q: StringUtil? A: If it's translatable, you can use it.
• Q: Any plans to add setting opacity to DOM? A: Yes. Send Joel the issue.

BTW, Google is writing a 50,000 line GWT app (and another 50,000 on the backend) to allow radio stations to view the ads that they are putting on the air.

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Comments: 2 so far

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1. 

   Hey, just a quick note to thank you for the great reporting of the GWT conference. While I wish I could have been there, your posts seemed to distil the essence of the presentations quite well, and were dense with relevant info.. much appreciated.

   Comment by ivar vasara, Thursday, December 6, 2007 @ 5:53 pm

2. 

   I agree. Thanks for the comprehensive reporting and insights.

   Most people (I’m thinking Sco..l) simply blog to let everyone know where they are. It’s really quite sad.

   This was real reporting.

   Any chance you can summarize the reporting. I’d like your full take on GWT.

   Comment by TP, Thursday, December 6, 2007 @ 9:07 pm

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