After looking at how Google Web Toolkit could be used to produce mobile phone applications I have written up an article here: http://www.bristol-gtug.org/?p=76

I attended the OpenMIC BarCamp event in Bath last week and was interested to learn about mobile widgets. Mobile widgets are basically mobile apps build with web technologies. They come in different flavours but all are a collection of JavaScript, CSS and image files together with an HTML file. These files are then packaged in a zip file with an XML descriptor (a bit like a war) and can be deployed to a mobile phone. I just deployed my by sending the file via Bluetooth. The application then can be started like a normal app although it is effectively a local web site running the browser full screen. Obviously the big wins here are that the JavaScript code is cross platform and the deployment does not require an app store.

As GWT generates JavaScript code I thought it would be suitable for packaging up as a mobile widget so as I have a Nokia phone I took the Nokia WRT kit and gave it a go. The results were very promising and my test GWT app worked very well on my phone, a Nokia E72.

The problem is of course that you cannot use RPC calls as you don’t have a server. However you can use JSONP to talk to a remote server which is perfectly adequate and this works well so far too. Using GWT to produce mobile widgets seems to have a lot of potential for creating mobile apps very quickly and with little pain. It would be great to hear from anyone else who is using this approach for mobile apps and any problems they encountered that I haven’t yet.

Over the last few days I have been asking people the question: “What are the top 5 skills you look for in a software developer?” in preparation for my talk at unConference 2009 in Singapore in two weeks time. I have been gathering the results together in some sort of draft diagram and they are available here. I would really welcome any comments and suggestions for improvement.

I was pleased to read today that a new version of GWT (Google Web Toolkit) has been released. I have been working with GWT for the past 18 months or so and really like it as a platform particually when coupled to a Spring backend. It looks like 1.6 represents another step to GWT becoming a serious mainstream platform and now includes a proper plugin for Eclipse and the ability to publish to the Google App Engine. I am sure I will be taking a proper look over the next few weeks. A good start to understand what is going on with App Engine however are these videos:

Yesterday I went along to Mix-It-Up: Visual Studio 2010, ASP .NET 4.0 at Microsoft to learn about Microsoft’s upcoming development tools. Having not worked with Microsoft tools for several years and being way down the Java and Google Web Toolkit road in terms of AJAX development I was interested to see what Microsoft’s take on AJAX is.

I believe that I have made the right decision, Microsoft’s tools and approach to AJAX development seems complex and even a little clumsey. I may be bias but Google’s approach with GWT; which is that you write code in Java and it is compilied into optimised JavaScript seems so much more elegant, from my point of view much easier to develop and more importantly manage and support.  I will not be switching any time soon.