This post is part of the Who's
@ Google I/O, a series of blog posts that give a closer look at developers who'll be
speaking or demoing at Google
I/O. This guest post is written by Reuben S. Kerben and Andrei Volgin, CEO and
President of Spiral Universe, who
will be demoing as part of the Developer
Sandbox.
When we started working on a new school
information management system a couple of years ago, we wanted to make it available to all
schools around the world even if they could not pay for it. Cloud architecture was the only
way to go. The key challenge was to build a user interface that could work with any modern
browser, support any language, and did not require any plugins. We chose Google Web Toolkit (GWT). There were
other RIA frameworks available, but few matched the scalability, performance and flexibility
of the Java + GWT combo.
GWT was in its infancy at that time, and our
first "webtop" UI was sluggish. It took a leap of faith to stick with the webtop concept. We
hoped that advances in web browsers and the GWT compiler would improve our UI performance by
the time we hit the market. The GWT team delivered! Once we upgraded to GWT 2.0,
the UI became very responsive, and now it closely mimics the desktop experience.
We also must thank Darrel Meyer and the Ext GWT team for improving their
library, on which we rely heavily, and the entire Chrome team for raising the performance bar
so quickly. After more than two years of coding, we released our beta to the public this
January. Today, our system is already used by schools in 80 countries! We are proud to
participate in Google I/O to show off our technology and, hopefully, inspire other developers
to rethink their approach to UI. We also plan to shop for apps that we can integrate with our
system. If your company has a cool product or service that schools, teachers, students or
parents will be interested in, send us a note, or come talk to us at the Developer
Sandbox.
Posted by Reuben S. Kerben and Andrei Volgin, CEO and President of Spiral
Universe
