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

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