GWT - Google Web Toolkit comes out of Beta

Before you come to read the main topic that is just a link and a paragraph, please read the mail below

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From: Chinmay Patel

Date: May 18, 2006 2:14 PM
Subject: Introducing GWT - Google Web Toolkit
To: Team ESS

Hi All,

As we all know and believe, AJAX has the power to make our Web Apps more dynamic and more user friendly and more likely to Win Apps. However AJAX development is often complicated, with much of the development time spent working around browser quirks (Well... we target the great IE so we've an advantage over here) and the fragility of AJAX components(MSXML, Scripting and the CodeBehind in our case). Trust me, I know the development of our own AJAX apps caused us no small amount of AJAX-induced frustration.

And now, after working a lot on Scripting part of AJAX as well as codebehinds that work with AJAX, Today I see

this in my mailbox, an exceptional toolkit for AJAX Developers - GWT ie Google Web Toolkit.

As they say on official GWT Page:

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don't speak browser quirks as a second language. Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatibilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript's lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile.

GWT lets you avoid many of these headaches while offering your users the same dynamic, standards-compliant experience. You write your front end in the Java programming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.

I believe we all will benefit a lot from this toolkit, though its made for Java we've got the skills to make it work with .Net.

So here it is with all the best wishes and faster AJAX Development

Download GWT
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Thanks,
Chinmay Patel

Free thyself from the past, free thyself from the future, free thyself from the present. Crossing to the farther shore of existence, with mind released everywhere, no more shalt thou come to birth and decay.

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Almost after a year I am revisiting the topic, as last week GWT came out of Beta and now is a Release Product. They've gone through many updates since last year and presents a really nice tool for Java developers as I have not tried it for .Net I won't comment on that part. Any takers?

Here is the link for latest information on Official Google Blog on GWT.

Yahoo! punches back to the spammers

Few days back, as usual I was tired... bored and thought of killing time so I fired up Y! Messenger and logged in and straightway went to chat rooms...and voila... I was shocked... each and every category I saw... Computer and Internet, Gujarat Global Chat, Gaming, etc was flooded with users. Each room was running on top of its capacity. Instantly I came to know that some massive and pretty smart Bot-Net was in action and was playing Havoc on Y!'s network. Infact there were some funny side effect(This is an assumption, I am not sure about it though), I was getting random users in my Y! popped up and some other random users were seeing me signing in ie even though I was not in their list, they got the notification when I logged in and logged out. It was funny... and not-so-funny for Y!. However within few days this got fixed and I was relaxed. I really don't like strangers asking me question how I popped up on their screen..and for that matter you also will not really like that. So actually I had to log out as it was virtually impossible to locate the room with real people... everywhere there were BOTS and I sighed.. and signed off...

And today... right now I logged in again to the Y! chat and I see one new one-inch punch from Y! for all the spammers and BOTs. No it is not some kind of Digital Martial Art, its a technology that is in use from quite a time and very popular among Web 2.0 outcomes - CAPTCHA. Y! has introduced CAPTCHA for Chat Rooms so whenever you try to go to any of the Chat Room it gives you a link to open when you open this link it presents you a nice interface to enter CAPTCHA information and once you do it successfully it allows you to enter and I must tell you it is working really fine now I see rooms much cleaner then they were ever used to be. And though it looks pretty lame to go to a web browser window before you actually can sign into a Windows based application but for what it is worth, I must say it works like a charm. Though I was wondering maybe this browser based authentication is meant to provide support to non-Y! Messenger chat clients like Trillian(Oh! Only I know how much eager I am for Trillian Astra!), YahELite, Pidgin(formerly known as Gaim) etc.Lets hope that soon they will have some built-in mechanism so atleast you can enter CAPTCHA in the chat client itself and enjoy Y! Chat Rooms.

A bug in Gmail

I have been using Gmail since its launch and I am really happy with the service they provide and the best part.. its free. Except some really nasty incidents Gmail has been almost bug free. However when you spend a lot of time with something eventually you will start seeing stuff that you might not notice otherwise. So here is a UI related bug and I've reported it two times and still there is no action that they've taken from their side so I thought I must publish it. Steps to reproduce this bug - Open your Inbox. - Check title, it will say Gmail - Inbox(Number of Unread Emails in the Inbox) - Now click on Settings click on the top-right side navigation - It will load Settings Page in the main list pane but now see the title... oops...:P