GwtAI 0.3

After many years, literally after many years, I managed to make a new release of the GwtAI project. The release is mainly about GWT 2.X compatibility and additionally contains some bugfixes. The JarLinker feature is worth mentioning, check out the API and GwtAI demos to see how to use it. The JarLinker is a neat way to use the GWT tool chain to spit out the resources (Jar file...) required to start your Applet in the browser. For big projects with lot's of dependencies it is probably easier to create the required resources with Ant or Maven.

Thanks to Michael Krog for helping with the project. He is working on some cool stuff for our next release. And also many thanks to the people on the Google Group who do help with support.

Download GwtAI 0.3 from its Google Project Hosting site...

Herbstcampus conference 2010

I have published the presentation slides and examples of my Herbstcampus conference talk on my website. In the talk I have presented some of the new features of GWT 2.0. At the end of the talk there were some code demos to showcase the most important new features, including Layout Panels, UiBinder and Code Splitting.


I used a small calculator web application for the example. The code can be found over here...

Jazoon 2009 presentation slides available

The Jazoon team has published the presentation slides of this year's conference on the Jazoon homepage. So the slides of my GWT talk are now available for download.

They have also uploaded tons of photos to flickr.

GWT at Jazoon 2009

My GWT session at the Jazoon conference is scheduled at June 23th at 11:00am. At this talk I will not cover typical visual concepts like widgets, layouts and styles but I will give an in-depth view on the true force that is driving GWT. The Deferred binding mechanism and the new Linkers subsystem.

There is a second GWT related talk, right after my session in the same arena. The talk by Ferda Tartanoglu is about Seam integration with GWT.

See the complete presentation program and speakers's list.

GwtAI - 0.2

I have made a second release of the GwtAI project. Besides some minor bug fixes it now contains a couple of new parameters:

• The LoadingImage parameter sets a custom loading image for the applet. The custom image replaces the default animation that is show during applet loading.


• The SeparateJVM parameter specifies that the applet should run in its own JVM instance (Java Plug-In >= 1.6.0_10 only).


• The JavaArguments can be used to pass JVM command-line arguments to the applet instance (Java Plug-In >= 1.6.0_10 only).


• The JavaVersion parameter specifies which JRE version is required to launch the applet (Java Plug-In >= 1.6.0_10 only).

In addition to the new functionality I have separated the core and demo code into two different Eclipse projects. That makes building GwtAI much easier.

Thanks to all the people who have sent me feedback and suggestions!!!

Bringing JavaFX and GWT together

JavaFX it the new kid on the Java block. There is a lot of buzz about this new technology. Although it is not quite stable yet and some people think Sun is too late to win the RIA (Rich Internet Application) market. None the less I’m a Java guy, so I just had to have a look at JavaFX. At first I had some problems to understand how things work with JavaFX. They made quite some changes to the API over the course of developing it and lots of the examples on the net are not up to date anymore. This causes some confusion and does not make things easier.

However once I got my first JavaFX code snippet running the next question was how to integrate it into a GWT website. A JavaFX application can easily be compiled into a Java applet. And that is where GwtAI come into play. Have a look at this demo to learn how to integrate JavaFX with GWT. Using GwtAI this only takes a couple of lines of code, the actual compiling and packaging things together was a bit more complicated. The JavaFX support in Eclipse is not that great, and a real pain in the ass is the fact that the GWT compiler does not work with JDK 1.6 (at least not under 64bit Linux) and the JavaFX requires a Java 1.6 environment… Argh… But I figured it out eventually.



Don't miss the demo!

Traceurl new functionality

Finally after months of promises I made an update of the Traceurl.com website. Now you can upload documents and trace accesses to this documents. The documents are stored in the very popular Box.net service. The new functionality is not yet finished and should be considered as beta. If you run into problems please let me know...

GwtAI - 0.1

Over the last weekend, I have finally made a first release of GwtAI. The project is still in an very early stage, but I got a couple of emails from people all over the world with questions and ideas. So I thought it is time to make something available for those who don't can or want to build GwtAI from SVN. The Applet integration and communication stuff is quite stable and already useful. The tray integration stuff does not yet work on all platforms. I have to read up and do some more tests with JDIC to get it to work on Linux and Mac.

Herbstcampus 2008

A couple of hours ago, I arrived in Nürnberg at the Herbstcampus Java conference. The conference is mixed with .Net guys so this promises to be interesting. I'll probably not gonna listen to a lot of .Net talks, still to get some impression from 'the other' (a almost said the 'dark') side may be enlightening. Tomorrow afternoon I am going to give my GWT talk again. Of course I had changed and improved it a bit. The talk is somewhat longer than the one from the Jazoon and I made a completely new demo application. I'll post the code and the presentation on my homepage later on...

GwtAI - GWT Applet Integration

In the past couple of days I have been working on a third party library to provide cross-browser no-hassle Java Applet integration for GWT. With the upcoming Java SE 6 Update 10 (a.ka. Update N) Sun provides a totally new browser plugin. With this move they want to bring the Java Applet and Web Start technology back. With the ability to drag an Applet outside of the browser and run it in a separate thread, Applets will become kind of equal to Web Start applications. The big advantage of an Applet that Applets are capable to talk back to the website that actually started them. So Applets may experience kind of comeback in the near future.

The GwtAI project is in an early stage, anyway have a look if you like.

Jazoon 2008 roundup

So the Jazoon 2008 is over and it was great fun. After my talk on the first conference day I relaxed and was enjoying the rest of the conference. In my book the presentations given by Joshua Bloch, Principal Engineer at Google, were the conference highlights. His presentation are not only informative but also entertaining. The opening sessions and keynotes are available as videos from Parleys, check them out yourself.

Most presentations, including mine, are already available for download from the Jazoon website.

Jazoon day 1 wrap-up

The first day at the Jazoon Conference is over. The Opening Sessions were really interesting. Martin Odersky started out with a talk on Scala which keeps to be the new thing to check out. Simon Phipps gave a really impressing talk on free software in the market, how to bring free software from niche to mainstream.

My own talk went quite well. I was less nervouse than I had expected, so it went like clockwork. Although I had quite a lot of slides I did not exceed the time limit. The slides will be available from the Jazoon homepage after the conference and I made the example sources avaliable from my private homepage.

A thrill of anticipation

I'm sitting in the Work Area at the Arena Flimcity where the Jazoon 2008 is going to take place. The Opening Session will start in about an hour. Web 2.0 technologies are quite a big topic here. Web developement, Ajax and all the frameworks around it get a lot of attention. There are three talks on GWT, one by myself :-)

Javapolis 2007 roundup

I'm back from the Javapolis 2007 conference. I had a great time over there in Antwerp. I have attended many interesting talks about Java, JSRs, GWT, Scala, methodology, testing and many more Java related topics. The Java Puzzlers by Neal Gafter and Joshua Bloch was the best (fun, interactive and informative) talk in my opinion. During and between the talks there were many discussions about different JSRs and the future of Java in general. To listen and talk to some of the greatest minds in the Java world was really enlightening. Another highlight was the Java Posse Live session, if you don't yet now the Javaposse podcast you have to check it out!

I have also met some people from the GWT community. Maarten Volders (Thanx for lunch!), Luc Claes and the two speaker of the Google Web Toolkit talk Didier Girard and Dick Wall.

I really hope I can be there in 2008!

Time series visualization in Google Gadget

I included the access time series visualization into the Traceurl Google Gadget. There is a new icon right next to the Google Map operation in the Traceurl Google Gadget. Click on the new icon and a new window with a time series chart for the respective traceable URL is displayed.

As mentioned in the previous post the Chronoscope platform does not yet support Internet Explorer, using IE you are getting a blank page. For this reason I'm not going to add the time series functionality to the Traceurl.com main application for now. I'll keep you up to date about future progress.

Time series chart

Okay, I finally got some new functionality up and running. It is not yet fully featured, because it relies on a beta version framework. The point of the new functionality is to visualize the accesses to a traceable URL on a time series chart. This is done with the help of the Chronoscope platform. Timepedia announce the first beta release of Chronoscope a couple of days ago and I have been playing around with it over the last weekend. The first shot of an access time series looks like this:



One of the coolest feature of Chronoscope can not be seen on the screenshot, it is the possibility to zoom and pan within the chart. Have a look at the demo page to see a live version, is really impressive! Chronoscope currently lacks IE support, thus the charts only work on Firefox, Safari and Opera. I hope they can fix that soon, because that is kind of a show-stopper :-(

Traceurl Google Gadget Update

A new Traceurl Google Gadget is online. By now the Gadget shows some more information and one can open a dialog displaying all access origins on a wold map (Google Map) from within the Gadget.



Click here to add the Traceurl Google Gadget to your iGoogle page.

GWT Demystified

People that want to know more about the insides of the Google Web Toolkit should read Ray Cromwell's GWT Demystified Triology. Ray Cromwell promises to digg deep into some of the more esoteric functionality of the Google Web Toolkit. His tutorials and essays are an interesting read for every advanced (or enroute to become advanced) GWT developer.

GWT 1.4 RC is out

As aforementioned Traceurl is built with the Google Web Toolkit. Since yesterday the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) 1.4 Release Candidate is available for download. This is the biggest GWT release yet. In addition to bugfixes, GWT 1.4 RC includes a ton of new features, improvements and optimizations.

Google Web Toolkit 1.4 Release Candidate

More about the idea

True to the motto 'user generated content' everybody in the 'word wide web' acts as an active editor. Either by having an own webpage or blog, by sharing bookmarks and joining chatrooms or forums. All the more it becomes interesting what happens to the content we make available in the internet. Don't you ever wonder how often and from where your contributions are accessed?

Traceurl.com resolves this concern. Once an URL is registered at Traceurl.com it is on a watch. This means that you can monitor whether an URL you have sent by email or posted to a form is accessed or not. The recorded access data allows analysis about the when and from where the accesses have taken place. Thereby one can estimate how interesting an URL is to the users and whether the URL has been forwarded.