I third that ( wait a minute is that even gramatically correct
english).
Anyway, absolutely agree, it was awesome to meet and pick the brains
of the GWT engineers.
Also it was a great opportunity to network with other like minded
folks. Although I would have loved to talk in depth with people about
their experience porting applications to GWT, specifically parts of
existing buisness applications.
I work on an business app for a very large company, where they would
not let me change the entire struts like jsp based app to using gwt,
they would change me rather than change the app :)
So I am trying to attack some of the pain points that we have now, in
the app.
Some key points that I felt were important from a take away
perspective were :
1. GWT is NOT a library.
2. Code size, dont matter so much since the compiler is really smart
and optimizes the generated javascript to the last bit.
3. Try not to create several modules, since that would not let the
compiler create the most optimized javascript.
4. More features like immutableresourcebundle, more collections
support, even tighter resulting javascript etc are coming.
5. GWT is very much a client side technology, very similar to AWT,SWT,
Swing, so in short it is very server-side agnostic. This particular
thing helped me a lot since i have to integrate into an existing app.
6. It is OK to use stuff out of the incubator project, provided you
test your code.
Ok good now time for some bitching :
The Tree Control is verrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry slow, i talked to Joel a
little bit about it at the conference, but just to give you and idea,
i did a test run tonite, of using the GWT Tree widget vs. using the
MYGWT Tree Widget, the test case was somethig like, 100 root nodes, 5
child nodes per root node, and 100 leaf nodes per child node.
The results are, MYGWT Tree control rendered in like 5 secs, the GWT
Tree control never was able to render 8-(
Now i know that I can use some tricks like lazy loading etc, but even
then, i bet it would be slow.
Also why do i really have to do that as a user, the control should
take care of that.
Robert Hanson correctly mentioned at some point that most users would
want to get clean, fast working widgets most of the times so that they
can do some real work and not spend time writing their own custom
widgets.
Oh BTW, the mygwt tree control is sweet, it has mostly got every thing
i need in a tree control, nice images, animation, most importantly
multi-select.
I just hope that more and more such widgets make it into the toolkit
or third party libraries.
Thanks a lot to all the GWT engineers.
Regards
-Sachin Khadilkar
Sr. Associate
MSCI Barra
> > CTO, The Elfenworks Foundation- Hide quoted text -
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