from GWT benefits to jQuery adoption
Google Web Toolkit (GWT), now in it’s second major release, has been around since 2006 (if not before) and I remember that it caused quite a commotion at the time, as it espoused the ability to create JavaScript based AJAX applications while programming in pure Java.
I was pretty interested in checking it out at the time but had little time on my hands and the proliferation of AJAX into the projects I was working on was pretty minimal in that perhaps one or two areas of the application leveraged the advantages of AJAX but it was far from being adopted application wide as the de facto client / server interaction model. In addition, many of the enterprise products I was dealing would have traditionally been slower in providing first class integration of newer technologies as a core product feature but were rather tacked on to fulfill customer requirements and sales & marketing demands.
I’ve had a little bit more flexibility in recent times in technology selection for new product development and have had the opportunity to use GWT and some additional libraries providing extended support for GWT and wanted to provide my insights in this blog entry and relate how what started as an evaluation of GWT ended in adoption of jQuery … (more…)
Amazon S3 deployment w/ JetS3t and Maven
While playing around with Amazon AWS for a little while last year and running a number of instances on the cloud I didn’t pay much attention to their file storage offering, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) for storing and distributing files on the cloud. All that changed recently when I came across an issue with Google App Engine and a third party library I was using.
The issue was that GAE has a file limitation for applications deployed to the platform of 3,000 files. The third party library being used was Smart GWT and after the GWT compilation step there was much more than 3,000 files in the web application causing the application deployment to fail. Unfortunately there’s no way around this on GAE except to host the files elsewhere, with Amazon S3 being the obvious candidate.
I had been using Maven for build and deployment and now needed to integrate deployment to S3 into the same build process and wanted to share how this was done in this post. The S3 service provides a straightforward ReST based API to manage deployments and there are a growing number of tools available providing a layer of functionality on top of the service. One need only search for “amazon s3 deployment tools” on Google to see the vast number available as browser plugins, windows explorer extensions and command line utilities.
For me, I came across an excellent suite of utilities called JetS3t that can be used to manage your S3 deployments … (more…)
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