GWT and Seaside: steps in the right direction for increasing developer productivity

Although most of my work is in AI development and general web services, I greatly enjoy writing user interfaces - this interest started in 1982 when SAIC bought me a Xerox 1108 Lisp Machine - the windowing system and general development tools were so good that they make most recent software development environments look weak.

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and Squeak Smalltalk based Seaside are pleasant exceptions. Just like using Rails, GWT and Seaside provide that pleasant "everything just works" experience and great interactive development environments.

Last night I used GWT and IntelliJ to prototype some web UI ideas. If you have not tried working with the GWT Development Shell, give it a try: changes to client side resources (style sheets and HTML) and to Java client side source code (automatically compiled to Javascript during development) are immediately reflected in the test web app. I don't have any current tasks dealing with Java web applications right now, but the next time I do, GWT looks like a very good framework choice.

Seaside also supports the same fluid interactive development style: changes made in a Squeak Smalltalk source browser are immediately reflected in running web application. Seaside uses continuations to provide a more linear programming model. Blocks of code are used instead of URLs; inside a code block, you can call another code block - after a "return", you continue where you left off in the first code block. There is a performance penalty for using continuations, but it looks straight forward to run multiple Squeak processes behind Apache so it look like Seaside scales the same way that Rails scales. DabbleDB is written using Seaside - a great proof of concept for scaling.

Comments

  1. haritvm4:48 AM

    Gwt is more supported by eclipse than intellij.
    i am using eclipse ,and i feel comfort in using it.
    Gwt is a wonderfull web tool. I have done my academic project in gwt using eclpse and mysql.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mark Watson, author and consultant6:50 AM

    Hello haritvm,

    I use IntelliJ, so it was natural to use the IntelliJ GWT plugin - the whole experience was good after an initial 20 minutes of learning/experimenting. The Google GWT code examples also helped a lot. Glad to hear that support is also good for Eclipse. Good luck on your school project.

    ReplyDelete

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