The GWT bet ...

The GWT bet ... Brice Le Blévennec Chief Visionary Officer ContactOffice.com FOWA 02-07

Hello ♣Brice Le Blévennec, Internet Serial Entrepreneur. ♣In 1991 founded Emakina (Alternext ALEMK) now belgium largest Interactive Agency (100+ staff), of which I am Chairman. ♣From 1996 to 2004 I produced and hosted CyberCafe, a weekly show about Internet and technologies on belgian national broadcast television and radio. ♣1999 co-founded ContactOffice, Collaborative & Messenging Web Application, of which I am Chief Visionary Officer ♣In 2007 co-founded Tunz.com, a mobile payment provider of which I am Chief Visionary Officer. ♣(more on brice.org)

10 minutes only ♣ContactOffice ? ♣Collaborative & Messenging Web Application ♣Features set ♣State-of-the-art ♣Reengineering the interface ♣Selecting an AJAX of Flash framework ♣Google Web Toolkit (GWT) ♣Overcoming limitations ♣Adding Drag & Drop to GWT ♣Beta launch TODAY

ContactOffice ? ♣Collaborative & Messaging Web Application ♣Founded in 1999 by 4 Belgian serial internet entrepreneurs

How big ? ♣1 million registrations ♣350.000 active accounts (feb 07) ♣250.000 paying accounts ♣Global, 6 languages ♣Profitable since 2003!

Functionalities

Collaboration & Messaging WebApp State-of-the-art Groups Organiser State-of-the-art Messenging Documents Repository Web upload or WebDAV RSS & Vod/Podcasts, Public sharing Collaboration Calendar (+ RSS) Mail (+ RSS), Contacts, IMAP4 & POP3(s), To Do, SMTP, Webmail, Notes, Forum, Wiki, Antivirus & AntiSpam, Bookmarks (+ RSS), Bulletin Board, SMS, Fax, Alerts & Chat Synchro ... Phone Calls, ...

Everything can be shared with users and groups! Sophisticated Access Right Model at user level Applications : Individual user, Families, Associations, Companies, Departments, All kind of teams, ...

ASP & Licence Models ♣Hosted, Security, SLA ♣Personalised, Private Label versions ♣SSO : LDAP, CAS, RSA ClearTrust, ... ♣API : XML-RPC

Technologies OO Architecture : ♣Object Oriented Database ♣Pure Java Backend (POJOs only) ♣Build for scalability ♣Clients abstraction layer: Web (HTML & CSS) ♣ Pocket Explorer + Symbian ♣ Wap (WML) ♣ Voice XML (prototype) ♣

Some happy customers

Reengineering the interface ♣Objective: Interface upgrade to present standards ♣Approach: Migrate 1999 interface to 2007 state-of-the-art GUI ♣Weakness: Obsolete Client Architecture (thousands JSP files) The 1999 Server Architecture (POJOs + OODB) ♣Strength: is still state-of-the-art Desktop like, Web 2.0 style, HTML + JavaScript + Frames Drag & Drop, Widgets, ...

Selecting a framework / technology Many goo solutions ♣Own framework ? ♣ Cost of supporting what others might doing well ? ♣Ajax vs Flash ? ♣ OpenLazslo, Adobe Flex ♣ Flash plugin dependency ? ♣Ultra lightweight client + server-side Java ? ♣ echo2, zk, ... ♣ Do they scale well ? ? ♣Existing JS frameworks ? ♣ Dojo, Scriptaculous/Prototype, ... ♣ JavaScript language ? ? ♣The JavaScript nightmare Fun but language is too flexible (global vars,...)  Requires an extremely strict discipline (convention) for a team  JavaScript How to handle efficiently tens of Klocs ?  Browsers quirks 

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) ? ♣ What is GWT ♣ GWT is a Google framework for building AJAX apps in the Java language ♣ Open Source Apache 2 Licence ♣ Java --> JavaScript translation ♣ 'Industrial' software engineering Tools ! Tools! (IDE Eclipse & GWT hosted mode + svn integration perfect for teams)  Standard Java refactoring, debugging, testing, source code manipulation  ? Compile time vs Run time errors detection  ♣ Advantages Google Performances:  Webtool Aggressive caching, code optimization, compression Kit Clean backend integration:  Efficient Java RPC mechanism Portability:  Generates platform-specific code Native JavaScript is still reachable:  JSNI (JavaScript Native Interface) Developer Community:  Large (Forums : 6900 users, 250 contributors) and active (+20K posts) JavaScript ♣ But... Java knowledge required for UI designers ♣ CSS only is not realistic

CO enhancements to GWT  MV(C) framework Strict model/view separation • ContactOffice Necessary for even driven interfaces (AJAX is asynchronous) • Enhancements Side effect : ease collaboration between presentation • and business logic developers  Drag & Drop “Hey Luc, I took a look at your demo - prety cool stuff!” Rajeev Dayal (Google) Google  Attractive look & feel Webtool ContactOffice use GWT styling possibilities to the fullest Kit  Contextual menus  Marquee selection  Draggable splitters  Data grid JavaScript  Enhanced dialogs, property pages

Current Interface http://www.contactoffice.com

New GWT based Interface http://beta.contactoffice.com Help and extra information Indication of new + total number of items in lists Dashboard giving quick access to main features Navigation repeated on left

New GWT based Interface http://beta.contactoffice.com Click to sort or resort Folder organization Email

New GWT based Interface http://beta.contactoffice.com Quick search List contacts Organize contacts per type

New GWT based Interface http://beta.contactoffice.com Click to sort or resort Multiselect documents Documents Folder organization

New GWT based Interface http://beta.contactoffice.com Quick navigate Filter Group calendar Export Details

New GWT based Interface http://beta.contactoffice.com Click to sort or resort Folder organization Group bookmarks

Beta Launch TODAY!

Try it now : http://beta.contactoffice.com

Questions?

Contact Us! info@contactoffice.com www.contactoffice.com blog.contactoffice.com

The GWT bet ...

by coolstuff on Mar 28, 2007

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