classical geek

My one day at QCon on Friday was interesting, plenty of good ideas and discussion. I kept to time in my own talk, and had some good questions. The highlights for me, though, were in hearing what everyone else had to say.

Bruce Johnson gave a good overview of Google Web Toolkit, something I’ve been following from a distance up to now with a certain amount of reservation. Generating a client-side UI on the server has always struck me as over-engineering, and up to the first third of his talk, my prejudices survived pretty much intact. By the end of the talk, though, I was seriously interested in giving GWT a try. What made me change my mind?

- because the entire codebase is written in a strictly-typed language (Java), global optimisations can be made with much more ferocity than in trying to infer intent from a loosely-typed language. As a human writing code by hand, I still prefer scripting languages, but I can see that all the safety harnesses help out when generating the code automatically.

- GWT doesn’t take as command ‘n’ conquer approach, but plays well with hand-written web UI. You can break out into Javascript in your code (overloading the native keyord - too cute!), and/or target GWT at specific elemnts in a hand-written page

- network performance, caching, and all that important-but-tedious plumbing detail benefit from the global optimisation approach.

On top of which, Bruce seemed like a down-to-earth guy, and very up-front about what it could and couldn’t do. He was also able to back up several performance assertions with real numbers and graphs.

So, I’m convinced enough to take it out for a drive, at least, and see if it’s for real. Compiling Java into Javascript still seems like a crazy idea, but it looks like they might have made it work!