Essential GWT

The trend toward Cloud Computing has even spawned a new concept: the “Death of the Desktop.” This presents rather starkly the problem of going overboard, to the limit: From the appearance of mini netbooks (with flash-based disks, slow processors, not much RAM) and iPhone-look-alike cell phones, some have reached the conclusion that desktop applications (and even desktop computers!) are on their way out. If this were true, it could be great for GWT developers, but things are a bit different.

Despite several impressive opinions and pronouncements from people all over the industry, the trend toward more powerful machines, with CPUs, memory, and I/O facilities that put to shame the supercomputers of just a few years ago, doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Even if you are enamored with the latest netbooks or high-powered cellphones, you should accept that working all the time with minimal screens isn’t the way that things can get done at a company. (And for gaming or graphic-intense usages, small machines aren’t so hot either; they may do, however, for business-oriented applications.) In any case, GWT can help you because you can use its layout facilities and CSS styling to produce applications for just about any device out there.

Also, remove the rosy glasses for an instant. Cloud computing offers several advantages (and GWT applications can be considered to be right in the middle of that concept) but also presents problems, so you need to plan accordingly. Aside from the obvious difficulty of dealing with possibly flaky web connections, security and compatibility can be stumbling blocks. (On the other hand, scalability is well handled; there are plenty of large sites, with hundreds or thousands of servers, proving that web applications can scale well.) The important point is, with or without desktops, GWT provides some ways around these kind of problems, and we’ll study this in upcoming chapters.6
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Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is another expression that has been bandied about a lot since its invention in 2004. Though there are way too many definitions for it, most seem to agree on the idea of using the “Web as Platform,” where all applications run in a browser instead of being preinstalled on your desktop. Furthermore, the idea of allowing users to produce their own contents (à la Wikipedia) is also included, highlighting the collaborative aspect of work, and thus bringing into the fold all kind of community and social networking sites (think Facebook or YouTube). Finally (and that’s what actually works for us) the concept of mashing together different data sources (probably from many web services) is also included.