donjaime_hn

Very cool :).

A few questions. What is the strategy is for concurrent modification of data? What are the consistency guarantees for the sync operation?

I can't speak to the details of the decision. But what I can say is that aside from canning our site, Google treated us pretty darn well. We were all offered relocation options to other Google offices, which would come with cost of living pay bumps, paid moving expenses, etc...

And they let us open source pieces of the thing we were working on. Pretty sweet.

Some stayed with the company. But unfortunately, many of us could not make the move to another eng site.

Yup! Vert.x is pretty cool :).

We decided to have a little fun with the open sourcing and play with some cool new open source tech for a change :).

I settled on vert.x (the server container that requires Java 7) because it seemed to have a lot of affordances out of the box for client-server transport, and it's architecture made it easy to port/re-build pieces of our server stack.

But yeah, Java7 on Mac is a pita :(.

Collaborative cursors and selection highlighting broke during the open sourcing. What we released contains a ton of brand new code since we essentially had to build from scratch a one-off local server to drive the parts of the client that it made sense to release.

Code churned a bit :).

I have it on my list to get that working again soon!

To be fair, I think the performance of that page has something to do with the embed API, and the face that it was trying to load multiple copies of wave.

The actual wave client performs pretty well now.

erm... sounds like you would be better off with a laptop/netbook ;)

Would be a good bit cheaper too.

I think the real selling point for them is their moderation tool for sifting through all the twitter/blog comment noise.

I gave it a try and I liked it. I used it along with their API to make a "vanity quotes dashboard" for some open source projects I contribute to.

plug :) -> http://gwtquotes.appspot.com

Probably not. I sometimes get annoyed when people, faced with the choice of gaining some domain knowledge before forming an opinion, decide to instead just be loud about things they know little about.

Personal attacks are lame though, even on the internet. Thanks for calling me out on it :).

I apologize.

You should look at UiBinder (part of GWT 2.0). You write HTML and CSS, stick it into a UIBinder template. And in 5 minutes you can take a designed mock and have it bound to a Java class in a very efficient way.

You get things like CSS namespacing and obfuscation for free with this approach too.

You clearly didn't RTFA.

I'll give you my personal reasons for liking GWT in a few short bullets.

1. Better tooling - IDE refactoring when I need to change things. Red squigglies when I make a typo or reference something thats not there. A real debugger with breakpoints for finding bugs. Auto completion and auto style formatting so I dont have to type so goddamn much.

2. Compiler optimizations - Your code gets faster and smaller. Write maintainable code, have it turned into performant code.

3. API's and libraries - easy client server RPC, discoverable wrappers for the DOM APIs. Reuseable widgets that have predictable structure/side effects!

4. Maintainable code base - If you worked with more than 4 engineers on a non-trivial product, you would understand the appeal of a Java code base. UIBinder lets me not worry about CSS name collisions.

I would go on, but you seem like a TLDR type of person, so it would probably be a waste of my time.

If you have a chrome window open, or a zombie chrome process, running it again will just fork a new window from the existing browser process.

Make sure you shut them all down before running.

Make sure you run chrome with the flag --enable-extension-timeline-api

You have to enable the instrumentation as explained in the getting started doc: http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/speedtracer/get-started.ht...

It was developed by members of the GWT team and was released as part of the GWT 2.0 launch, but it will work with any web application.