The playing field for developers all over the world has been levelled with the advent of cloud computing & web services. It's pretty much free for any developer to develop/deploy application over the Internet. There is no start-up cost.Scaling up can happen incrementally based business requirement with upfront investment & I think that's revolutionary in my opinion.
Here are my thoughts on Google App Engine, after deploying my first sample application.
Salient features of Google App Engine
- Google started supporting java on their engine in April - 09 - Ref
- Support for Google Id and Sign In
- Automatic Persistence -JDO or JPA (standards based approach, implementing standard Java APIs on top of App Engine where possible. So instead of using the underlying App Engine datastore API, developers can program against Java Data Objects or Java Persistence API)
- Local Development - Remote Depolyment
- Scalability and free Use - Pretty cheap
- Monitoring - Nice overview
- Eclipse plug in - I did not face any problem with while deploying.
- Limited support for JDK classes - When I tried converting my swing application to GWT one I found many of classes I used were not supported like java.util.Timer classes
- Native threads can't be spawned
Google unleashed App Engine with support for Python in 2008(April). This was Google's first entry into on-demand application development and deployment. Developers were able to build, develop and easily deploy apps using Python. I think it has been successful in that.The economic impact of is that cloud computing disrupts the data center world by slashing the capital and skills required to deploy a web application. I am betting on success of this model.
About the current application: java typing tutor
I created this sample application within an hour with GWT & published it. Initially I tried to porting my one of Swing application "Java Typing Tutor" which I created after reading the steve yegge's blog long back Programmings dirtiest little secret - BTW I don't believe that fast typist should also be better programmer in general, but it was interesting write up. Whenever I get time I do intent to make this application on par with my feature rich swing application.
GWT - Although I feel very comfortable coding with this framework, (may be because I spent lot of time in coding Swing Apps) it's API limitations are quite annoying(java.util.Timer does't work etc...). Initially I had the impression that converting a Swing application to GWT application is straight forward & I had even the ambition to write even converter!(paint() for GWT widgets), But I guess now I realized that it's not possible. The programming style, approach are quite different. Once I used wingS framework to convert one of swing application to web - it was straight forward because of deep integration with swing, but now apparently that project has died. It definitely requires a different mindset to develop web application than developing swing application.
Finally some happy notes for swing programmers:
Wicket & GWT are great saviours for struggling swing developers : With Swing GUIS losing their relevance, these 2 framework provides great pathway to move into web development.
Wicket & GWT are great saviours for struggling swing developers : With Swing GUIS losing their relevance, these 2 framework provides great pathway to move into web development.
Over all I feel GWT & Wicket are great framework for Swing developers to develop web application in terms productivity. Rails/Grails (or any request/response framework) guys can never match component developers in terms of productivity :-)
Advantage of GWT clients (or any fat client) is that they can tap into the resources of the client PC they are running on (such as memory to store state) and thus scale much better for large numbers of users. GWT produces something that is more akin to applets, independent applications that happen to be hosted on web page.
But where as,
Wicket still assumes that you want to build at least part of your application the 'old fashioned'
way, so that it will work without JavaScript, turn up in search engines, can be bookmarked so on...
So component developers can satisfy both the worlds.
"It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign," -Richard Stallman
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