Google Web Toolkit

My responsibilities on the project are going to be concentrated mostly on the front end, although since the team is small, I'm sure I will be somewhat involved in all aspects, including the Spring configuration, Hibernate, etc.

We have decided to use Google Web Toolkit for the front end, so I am busily learning as much as I can about this tool. GWT basically allows the developer to code in Java, and then the Java classes created are compiled by the GWT compiler into Javascript. The idea is that GWT has already done the work of making sure their code works well on all browsers, which should take a lot of the load off the developer. Hopefully there will be a lot less fuss over tweaks/hacks for browser incompatibilities. The toolkit contains several pre-designed 'widgets' which should make GUI design much easier. GWT also has built in RPC support for asynchronous calls to the server for updating the GUI. There is a little bit of a learning curve, but so far so good.

Spring Training

I have started work on a new project that is going to be using the Spring 2.0 framework. Since my experience with Spring is extremely limited, I attended The Spring Experience conference in Hollywood, FL in December 2006. I attended several sessions on Spring Basics, Domain Driven Design, JUnit Testing with Spring, and AJAX frameworks. I learned a lot, and was very impressed with the quality of the speakers. Of course, it didn't hurt to be right on the beach in an awesome resort hotel either!