State of GWT for mobile

I've been playing around with developing mobile apps using GWT. Using Java to output cross platform mobile apps seems like a no brainer. So I expected to find tons of examples, but that is not the case. I made a HTML5 offline web application demo for a recent talk on GWT. But this time I was up to create a real mobile app, something that could be published in an app store.

There are a variety of JavaScript frameworks (PhoneGap, jqtouch, Sencha Touch, titanium-mobile and others) tailored to mobile apps. But I could only find a GWT-wrapper project called gwt-phonegap for PhoneGap. PhoneGap has a very neat approach. It consists of two parts, one part is the actual JavaScript framework which provides access to mobile phone features including location data, accelerometer, camera, sound and more. The other part takes care of the integration of our HTML/CSS/JS code into a native mobile phone application. It sets up some type of WebKit view wrapped for all kinds of mobile platforms. Alas I could not get it to work properly. A new version of PhoneGap has been release just lately and gwt-phonegap did not play well with it (at least not in the Android emulator).

So I went back to the HTML5 route. There the a GWT third party library gwt-mobile-webkit which provides access to the HTML5 features of WebKit. That includes the W3C specifications W3C Web Database, W3C Web Storage, W3C Geolocation API and Application Cache API. I've only made a small test application using the location API. I've then used WebKit wrapper part of PhoneGap to make a native app for Android and one for the iPhone. That worked fine so far.

But I have to say, everything is kind of clunky, lot's of back and forth between the different project. And testing on the emulators is no joy either. I definitely want to go back to gwt-phonegap, having only one framework for everything could make things easier.

Anybody out there with a better approach?

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...

Traceurl goes GWT 2.0

I finally managed to update the traceurl.com website to GWT 2.0 (2.0.4 to be precise). Up to now traceurl.com was compiled with a GWT 1.5 compiler. This update should fix a couple of issues with IE8 and bring some overall improvements in performance. The update path was quite smooth, although I had to fiddle with some third party libraries. Let me know in case you experience any problems...

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.

TVizFX

TVizFX started as a learning project, and I have finally submitted it for the JavaFX Coding Challenge. TVizFX it is by no means complete, but yesterday was the challenge deadline so I had to submit what I got so far...

TVizFX visualizes your Twitter network in diagrams. Currently only a tree layout is supported, but more layouts, such as circular or organic layouts, will be added soon. You can zoom nodes and drag nodes freely. Tweets are faded in above the user's node in the diagram.

Go have a look...

JavaFX 1.1

I wrote a small (relatively) JavaFX application using the public Twitter API. As mentioned earlier JavaFX runs fine under Linux although it is not yet officially supported.

I have been using Eclipse for many years. Which means I'm a total Netbeans newbie, but Netbeans generally behaved and I found my way around pretty well. Though the support for JavaFX in Netbeans is not as good as other language support in NetBeans.

The thing I am missing the most in JavaFX are some kind of good component libraries. Chances are good, that the next version is going to solve that one. JavaOne may brings some new things...