Members Only Cumulus will be built with Google Web Toolkit
Thursday, October 22, 2009
(Members Only Software, Inc.)
GWT - The
Google Web Toolkit - won the nod from our
technical leads as the engine to use to drive
the user-interface for Cumulus,
our new web-based application for non-profit
management.
The Google Web
Toolkit is a Java-based environment
for website development, created by the
team at Google and distributed as an
open-source project. Looking to Google for
web-development tools is in retrospect a bit of
a no-brainer. Over the last several years
they have released a series of applications
that progressively raised the bar for
browser-based engineering -- think Gmail,
Google Maps, and Google Earth.
GWT was
several years in development, while Google
passed over it for use in its own
revenue-generating applications until finally
deciding it was ready for prime-time earlier
this year. Now GWT is getting a lot of
attention for its use in the super-slick user
interface of
Google Wave, the new communications app
that the folks in the GooglePlex are hoping
will revolutionize the email
paradigm.
In the last year, the
developer community has embraced the toolkit
rapidly. New GWT-based accounting software, CRM
and web-site development frameworks, social
media applications, and educational tools are
appearing daily. But why are software creators
so excited about GWT?
- GWT allows the building of very responsive AJAX user interfaces with the stability and performance of desktop apps.
- GWT greatly reduces the agony of programming around all the differences between the major browsers.
- GWT comes with a rich library of visual interface components that is always being expanded by the user community.
- GWT allows virtually seamless communication between the browser and java servlets running on the web server.
- GWT provides a mobile interface the simplifies the creation of mobile phone versions of an application.
For more information, contact michael@membersonlysoftware.com If you are of a techy persuasion, stay tuned: we'll soon be posting a page describing the entire development environment for Cumulus, with links to a variety of GWT resources.