Live (Brief) Blog: GWT Extreme!

Ray Cromwell (Timepedia.org)

GwtQuery (aka GQuery) is jQuery ported to GWT. Sweet! It has some extra features though - compile time selector parsing, and optimisation by transforming into document.querySelectorAll() on Safari 3.1, on Firefox, Opera & older safari it uses the xpath document.evaluate(). On IE <8 it uses DOM & regexps - urgh, but necessary.

Generators - feature of deferred binding. It replaces requested type with generated calss definition, like in Ruby. Nice!

GwtQuery uses annotations and compilation to get a 5:1 code size decrease when compared to jQuery. The code is lean and readable, increadibly impressive. It's being released as an alpha today - definitely having a look at this asap!

Also demoed are a high performance graphics API for GWT, and a chart API - Chronoscope. Seeing 1 million rectangles animated in a browser, and 1 million points animated on a graph using javascript is impressive, I have to say.

Syndroid is interesting. It allows you to write gadgets in a restricted API and compile to Dalvik, JS or (in the future) AS3.

An interesting GWT to SWF technique was shown, and although a hack was pretty awesome. I wonder if there's a future in this?