Google To Show Off Developer Tools

Google plans to focus significantly on its Google Web Toolkit (GWT), among other things, at its upcoming Google I/O developer conference at the end of May.

According to a 22 April blog post on the Google Code site, Google I/O will be rich with GWT content, including a number of sessions on improving productivity and application performance with GWT. In addition, there will be a number of external GWT developers leading various sessions and taking part in the Developer Sandbox at the conference.

A description of the Developer Sandbox on the Google I/O site, said, “The Developer Sandbox is a new addition to Google I/O. Comprised of ‘pods’ – demo station areas grouped by product theme – the Sandbox will feature a wide range of developers who have built applications based on technologies and products featured at Google I/O. Representing large and small companies, individual developers, and a diverse group of apps, these developers will be on hand at the Sandbox to demo their apps, answer questions, exchange ideas, and meet you in person. Members of the Google product and engineering teams will also be on hand.”

A group of external GWT developers will be on hand to show what they are working on along the GWT front. The group includes Red Hat’s JBoss division, Timefire, StudyBlue and Lombardi Blueprint.

For its part, JBoss will present at the Developer Sandbox and will discuss some of the efforts JBoss and Red Hat have undertaken with Google. Indeed, Red Hat developer communities such as the Fedora Project and jboss.org have collaborated with Google on a number of developer initiatives over the years including Google Summer of Code, Hibernate Shards, integration with Drools and the Seam Framework and Google Gadgets integration with JBoss Portal.

StudyBlue is an academic network which enables students to connect with each other and offers study tools. StudyBlue’s website is built entirely with GWT. According to StudyBlue, GWT allows for complete AJAX integration without sacrificing usability or integration capabilities. StudyBlue will be at the Sandbox.

Meanwhile, Timefire produces scalable, interactive visualisations of up to millions of data points for business intelligence, analytics, finance, sensor networks, and other industries in what the refers to as “Google Maps, but for the time dimension,” said Christine Tsai, a member of the Google Developer Products team in the April 22 blog post. “Their platform’s built on Google Web Toolkit from the ground up, but also runs natively on Android. Timefire also uses App Engine’s new Java language support for their social charting tool.”

And Lombardi Blueprint is a cloud-based process discovery and documentation platform accessible from any browser, Tsai said. “They’ve used GWT since early 2007 to write the client side of Lombardi Blueprint. GWT has enabled Lombardi to focus on writing and maintaining their Java code, while taking care of creating the browser-specific optimized AJAX [Asynchronous JavaScript and X M L] for them.”

In addition, Tsai listed what she called “one little known fact.” That fact is that Google has used GWT to help in the development of several Google products, including Google Moderator, Health, Checkout, Image Labeler, and Base.

The search giant released version 1.6 of GWT on 7 April and included a Google plug-in for the Eclipse open-source application platform and integration with Google App Engine’s Java language support.