The great thing about cloud-based applications is that it doesn’t matter what they’re written in or how they’re constructed, all that matters is that they do what you need them to. What’s the back-end of your phone system written in? Odds are you don’t know and don’t care.
That being said, there are group of folks, lets call them “developers” who are interested in what goes on behind the curtain. For that group of people and others who find this kind of thing interesting and informative, read on.
What to build Blueprint out of?
When the team first started developing Lombardi Blueprint, they began with Java on the back-end and a combination of HTML and Flash on the front end. When, due to plug-in issues, this didn’t work they moved to pure HTML and JavaScript using Dojo. This too had its issues, namely performance and a lack of visibility.
Around this time Google Web Toolkit (GWT) 1.3 was released and the team decided to give it go. This turned out to be the right choice. GWT, which compiles Java code into JavaScript as you go, enabled the team to write both the back and front ends in 100% Java.
GWT, which was originally released in May of ’06, is 100% open source licensed under the Apache License 2.0.
Here’s a good entry posted by Olivier Modica, the Blueprint engineering manager that simply lays out the advantages that GWT provides the Blueprint team: How GWT is enabling Blueprint’s agility.
Gory Detail and Extra-credit reading
If you really want to dive into what the team did with GWT and Blueprint, check out the video of the talk Alex Moffat, lead architect on Blueprint, and Damon Lundin gave at Google I/O back in May.
Also if you want to learn more about the performance of the recently released GWT 1.5, check this out: Blueprint and the Performance of the GWT 1.5 Hash Map
Pau for now…
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