Google Web Toolkit experiences

I just started toying arround with GWT (Google Web Toolkit). Here's my thoughts so far:

• [GOOD THING] It makes the building and running on the development environment simple. It doesn't offer the flexibility of a running interpreter, but it provides two commands (scripts), one for compiling and another for running a box (development shell) that is an application container (tomcat based) with a small browser for a quick test.
• [GOOD THING] An application has to import only a couple of jar's to run
• [BAD THING] We have the old Template Model problem. We have two source folder structures, one "client" with the java files, and a "public" with the html templates, images, CSS, and other files to be published directly. The HTML templates should contain id's called "slot1", "slot2", and so on, for each object that is placed with Java to be attached to a certain place in the template... Is this horrible or what? The good thing is that google also lets us do (almost) everything without a template, creating defaults!
• [BAD THING] I just noticed something weird in the demo application, the KitchenSink. a page with a floating dialog box, that warns with the following:

"If you're wondering why there's a list box at the bottom, it's to demonstrate that you can drag the dialog box over it. This is noteworthy because some browsers render lists and combos in a funky way that, if GWT didn't do some magic for you, would normally cause the dialog box to appear to hover underneath the list box. Fortunately, you don't have to worry about it -- just use the GWT DialogBox class." Now this is (1) weird, as it seems we're still dealing with black-magic in order for things to appear right on the screen, and (2) wrong, as the google shell browser still shows the listbox over the dialog box, if we drag it towards the right (oddly enough, a left drag runs ok...)

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After having some meetings about the future of my ...

After having some meetings about the future of my research in the ESW group (at INESC-ID), I've set a few goals to my PhD. I'm now a part of a project that will integrate a workflow management system into a Web Application development methodology. My contribution is centered on the following RIA features:

• Easy rich content development on a web application
• Disconnected browsing, used to enable specific parts of the workflow to be worked on without requiring a permanent Internet link.

The second point is my main goal, as the first is being more and more common every day (do a google search for 'AJAX' and check it out!). To achieve disconnected browsing, one of the biggest challanges is to find out what is going to be the persistency model - given that the information is always shared and interacted with between two possibly remote machines.

Some questions to be answered:

• What is the minimum ammount of information needed in the client for it to be able to execute operations offline?
• What are the security issued underlying such an information sharing?
• How can workflow activities be moduled so that they can be run isolated from the rest?
  

Here is a summary of the activities I fullfilled i...

Here is a summary of the activities I fullfilled in my PhD, during this year:

• Curricular Courses: I have completed the curricular component of my PhD, with the following courses:
• • Formal Software Development: Based on the B-Method, this course was about the development methodologies with the help of formal specifications;
  • Advanced Topics: I studied the Desktop applications interfaces development tools, their types and characteristics. I also read Jenifer Tidwell's "Designing Interfaces" book.
• Research:
• • I made a study on remote desktop interactions, where I calculated the required ammount of network bandwidth to enable common user interactions to be executed in remote applications, such as mouse moves and clicks, or key presses. The conclusions were satisfatory, as today it is possible to enable complex interactions over the web, even if they are mapped as a set of basic - and non-optimized - operations.
  • I analised several tools that help the development of Rich Internet Applications (or RIAs).