I have been using SmartGWT a lot for a customer's project so I have been generally digging into both the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and the SmartGWT system that builds on top of GWT. My personal project is a reimplementation of my Rails application for ConsultingWith.me ( very old placeholder page ) in GWT. I plan on writing a few long blog articles about GWT and/or SmartGWT in the near future but for now I have learned a few things that are worth sharing: Plan ahead on designing data models that essentially live on the client side, that support caching on the client side, and efficiently support asynchronous data fetches from the server. The view pages (written in Java, compiled to compact and efficient Javascript) must always make asynchronous calls to the local (in the browser) data model because it is unknown whether the local model has the data or must itself fetch asynchronously from the server. Stop thinking about session data in the same way that you do in an old style we

It has been a long time since I tried to run the wave protocol stuff. I just grabbed the latest source and followed these directions on my MacBook. I was quickly up and running with no problems. The web UI is a lot simpler than Wave but looks similar. Wave in a Box is looking good as a development platform - something to customize for your organization. I used two browsers, Chrome and Safari to create two test accounts, and as I expected, the real time messaging, etc. worked fine.