My GWT Adventures thus far

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I started playing around with GWT. I'm working on 2 different projects with it right now and its pretty exciting. I ran into my largest issue last night when I attempted to pass state objects to the clients. I came to a crossroad where I could have polling or persistent connections so the server could push updates. I learned about Comet and integrating this into my GWT app. Essentially you have the server maintain connections with each client. I felt that it wouldn't be appropriate. I feel like it doesn't scale all that well.

"Yeah, like polling does!?"

Well, polling isn't great, but you can deny a polling request with little or no backlash with the way I'm implementing the game. Also, if you need to, you can just redistribute new requests to a different server. Again, this is all with my implementation and I can see obvious situations where this wouldn't be the case.

So anyway, I've got basic functionality down, I need to throw a front end on it so I can do some string testing. I do wish that I was better at LNF type stuff.

Also I signed up for Twitter. I've seen some posts on Lifehacker and some other blogs so I figured I'd give it a shot. My friend Dave actually suggested a decent extension to this using your phone with GPS for live twitter action. That would be fun, and 1984.

My Feelings on Open Source

At work I've been doing some work thats quite a bit different from what I'm used to. Essentially I'm using an Access DB. I'm not exactly cool with this. Putting the front end on it introduced me to VBA so there is that. What bothers me about it is how restricting the supplied environment is on the development process. If you run into an error due to a null reference or similar, I find that I can't look at the DB to see where in my queries I went wrong. Very strange. My theory on what is actually happening is that MS developed a GUI for a Database system, then built the DB system and entirely integrated the UI into the DBMS entirely violating MVC.

This may not be true, I think the whole OLE 'framework' introduces massive (for my tastes) coupling to the system. Which explains why no effort was put into a CLI for Windows. I think its very strange and coming from development on a Linux system, doing ANYTHING the OLE way is not very comfortable.

So at work we started talking about using different plugins or 3rd party workarounds to get things the way you want them in windows. The problem is that these solutions aren't supported by anyone other than some script kiddies which yeilds 0 standardization efforts bringing us back to 0 support.

So then we started talking about some open source projects we use and I started thinking how the whole reason we use Open Source products is because of the ease of customization and the way these things in general seem to be supported. Once an add-on has enough support, it becomes integrated into the original baseline. I suspect tabs in Mozilla's browser were like this and I suspect that mouse gestures will be added as well someday.

So with that I noted that there are so many open source products that I use right out of the box and they are exactly how I want them. Its the adaptive nature of OSS and how it changes with the users needs. Still it must be noted that for me the whole reason I got into OSS was because of customization an such, but now as I said, everything is right out of the box.

I thought it was interesting. Especially the part about working with MS Dev tools and feeling like I stepped back in time to Windows 3.1. Its so crazy.

Just a few things I want to mention. First, obviously I've moved to Blogger courtesy of a program from Paul Cooley over at Linux Lore. Its a pretty decent tool that does everything I need. The only issue is that it requires the .net framework to be installed. I guess its ok, but it still just seems like a gigantic overhead for a small task (the .net install, not his).

So with blogger comes some very decent changes. For one, I can now use analytics on my blog which is something I couldn't do in LJ. Thanks for visiting people from France. Oui! And that about sums up what I know of the French language. But its really nice to have analytics data that actually gets exercised. Its tight. I like the look and feel a bit more on blogger. Maybe I just like change in general, but so far I'm happy.


I also picked up a tool called jUploadr for my Mac which allows me to upload to Flickr. I've been trying to find my favorite web album, I think I've found it. Holy cripes flickr. I never understood why people said that Flickr was a leading force in the 2.0 revolution, but actually using it to organize my photos really opened my eyes. Man that rules. I really dig the map feature now. Which gives me an idea for a new organizer. I gotta get on that.

Speaking of my Mac, I got some new Rams in there. What sucks is that my original 512 came in 2 sticks, so adding a gig was really adding .75 gigs. That sucks, At least my theory on diminishing returns for adding the second gig stick is totally false. Woot.



Thats about it.

Fun with Google tools

Over the past few months I've decided to be productive. I got into a few coding projects I've always wanted to get into so I could practice some languages that I didn't really know. Like my
Athletic Tracking thing (with awesome styles of course)(oh by the way, I'll be getting my broken GPS back so I can start exercising again)(3rd paren: I wonder if its a good idea to post live shipping info on a blog, probably not...). Kathy and I started working on a game which is still in the early stages in Gliffy, but that'll be fun.

Besides coding things up, I've been working with Google's free toolsets. Man they have some cool stuff. Besides the obvious Mail, Maps, Calendar, and Search, I've also gotten into Docs(awesome), Analytics, Adwords, Adsense, Dodgeball, Groups, Picasa, Reader(super awesome) and of special note is Notebook (which is super awesome because of the FF plugin supplied), and a few more.

The latest tool I started using is GWT which I think is so sweet I can't even imagine it. I've used a few frameworks in the past 2 years and I've found mostly frustrating results with them. Possibly it is because most of the tools use languages that I am not too familiar with. GWT seems to be built for Eclipse, or at least Eclipse is built to allow tools like GWT to be seamlessly integrated within. The fact that I'm back in the Java swing (nice choice of words eh?) of things is also very, not to sound cliche, refreshing (lol if you knew how java came to be).

The point of GWT is that you can write Java code and have it translated into Javascript. To me, this is a sweet gap between quasi compiled code (Java) and entirely interpreted code (Javascript). For me, development in JS is just so unstructured and difficult to deal with. I really enjoy my eclipse IDE which tells me when I do stupid things in Java, but I want to be able to do the flashy things you can do in JS. GWT feeds my hunger, and I love it.

I started working on a fun little app which so far looks a hella lot better than my Athletic Tracker. The forced organization of Java allows simpler css(ing). So I'm pleased.

In conclusion, Google has some really fun, time-saving tools.

In other news: I've been to San Diego 2x this year and I can't wait to go back, see the link for my Picasa above for pictures. We went swimming/surfing/boogie-boarding in like 50 degree water. Wet suits rule.

And I've been eating somewhat healthy again. Thats about it.