Google Web Toolkit out in the wild

DEC 11, 2008
By Christine Tsai, Google Developer Products

Since Google Web Toolkit (GWT) launched, there have been many rich, robust Ajax applications which developers have told us they wouldn't have been able to build without GWT. We're thrilled to hear that GWT has increased productivity for developers and helped them to improve performance of their AJAX apps. On that note, we'd like to introduce you to 4 developers across a diverse range of web apps -- all of which were built with GWT. Whether you're new to GWT or not, these developers share some great insight into how they used GWT, what they like and would like to see from GWT, and finally their own learnings from building with GWT.

These developer videos, as well as descriptions of other GWT-built apps, are available here: Who's Using GWT. And if you're interested in the latest on GWT, check out the Official Google Web Toolkit Blog.

*Viewing tip: While we've embedded the videos here, we highly recommend watching them directly on YouTube and choosing the "watch in HD" option.

GoGrid is a cloud computing infrastructure service provider which enables you to deploy and scale load-balanced cloud server networks via a multi-server control panel. GoGrid was recently named Best In Show at LinuxWorld 2008. "We wanted to build a thick client inside the browser... GWT is very powerful and has increased our productivity greatly... We're able to build a very complex, rich, UI application quickly and easily." - Justin Kitagawa, GoGrid



Lombardi Blueprint is a business process mapping and diagramming tool. "We don't have to worry about all the browser quirks that you fight with when you're writing in pure javascript. We just write in the language that we like to use and they take care of all the difficult bits for us." - Alex Moffat, Lombardi Blueprint



scenechronize is a production management web application for film, television and commercials. "We chose to use GWT because it allowed us to write in Java which opened up a wide range of tools available for Java-based apps.... Because GWT supports multiple browsers, we're able to write our app so it looks and works the same across 4 major browser types." - Rob Powers, Scenechronize



Whirled is a social virtual world website which includes multi-player games. "We used GWT to build the social networking website part of Whirled, and it's done a lot of the heavy lifting for us... Whirled is now about 60K lines of code just for the client. Being able to enforce the same kind of engineering discipline that we do everywhere else has been a huge help." - Michael Bayne, Whirled