Just Talk About Web
Techniques Behind Modern Web
Highlights of GWT and Volta
Author: Jimmy22 Jan
Didier Girard, CTO of SFEIR a consulting company based in Paris which has been developing a number of GWT applications, gave a talk to InfoQ on goals, benefits of GWT and how it is different from Microsoft Volta.
Some important points he highlighted about GWT are:
- GWT is a technology which enables the development of Rich Internet Applications (RIA). GWT is dedicated to building traditional information systems while Flash, SilverLight… puts emphasis on multi-media applications.
- GWT eliminates page navigation paradigm, this is about a single page application or more exactly an entire application accessed via a single URL. One of the goals of GWT is to give a desktop like user experience with the advantages of zero-deployment and cross-browser compatibility.
- GWT is very easy to use similar to VB. As long as a developer knows how to create a user interface in Java, he/she can use GWT.
- In MVC architecture, GWT is the view, there are no necessities for models and controllers for a simple application. Yet, developer can make use of traditional MVC approach when the application becomes more complicated.
Then he pointed out what Volta means:
- The Volta vision goes considerably beyond GWT. GWT is a Java to JavaScript compiler while (1) Volta is independent of the programming language (a developer can generate JavaScript directly from its preferred programming language). And (2) with Volta, you can develop an application and decide where the code executes later.
- He supposed that the first capability of Volta is surely useful but the second one is just theoretical.
- We should think of GWT or Volta as GCC for the web and we should start viewing JavaScript as the universal web runtime and start to forget it as a programming language.
And he had comments on the trend of “browser as a platform” motivated by Google:
Current browsers are incomplete, and this is why Google is developing Gears which includes a local database, a WorkerPool and a local server. This is only the first step. The second step is going to be defining interactions between the browser and the services. Google is now developing APIs to deal with synchronization issues, for instance transactional interactions between the cache and the services. Intermittent connections are really a fact of life, a lot more so than network latency and bandwidth. For instance, an iPhone is not always connected. Google is trying to solve this problem. Many other APIs may be coming for Gears : multiple files uploading API, Crypto API, Logging API, Messaging API, Location API, Desktop Shortcut API, Image Manipulation API (Just check Dion Almaer’s blog for more information). The vision behind Gears is certainly why it won the PCWorld “Most Innovative Product of the Year“.
“If you are a java developer, give GWT a try, you will adopt it. And if you are a .NET developer, keep an eye on Volta, it is certainly a keystone of Microsoft web strategy.” concluded Didier Girard.
Though Didier tried to separate GWT from Volta in technology aspect and vision, I found basically they have the same approach. Both aim at generating JavaScript from server-side languages, ceasing browser incompatibility, creating single -page apps etc. How do you think?
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3 Responses for "Highlights of GWT and Volta"
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Two points:
1) Javascript is just one of target languages/platforms Volta can translate to. Silverlight has been mentioned as the potential target platform.
2) Deferring tier splitting is the bigger concern of Volta. To deal with presentation tier, abilities of compiling .net languages to Javascript/Silverlight/(any other presentation technology) is a must.To me, Volta has a much larger ambition than GWT.
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GWT is also open source, and it would not take much to modify the GWT compiler to spit out Actionscript or JScript/Silverlight. I’ve already prototyped Flash/Silverlight generation myself.
Volta may be a larger ambition, but I think tier-splitting is naive. Subjective web app performance is dominated by dataflow issues, which makes moving code between tiers with simple annotations or automatic heuristics for real world apps problematic at best. See my example here: http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Web-Toolkit-Contributors/msg/41f72846751e724c
Volta’s current demo is bad on this front. 20+ seconds to start up and hundreds of HTTP requests for a simple ajax dictionary app. Volta’s compiler has a long way to go to catch up to GWT’s Javascript output although I’m sure given enough time, MS will catch up.
I find the GWT vision for building high speed, responsive, fast-loading Web apps compelling and less blue-sky. Volta is predicated on solving a problem that I’m not sure is really a problem by opening up a can of worms that may do more harm to the developer. In most apps, it is clear that you want to run data intensive operations close to the tier that contains the data, rather than download a huge result and process it locally, and any ‘hand split’ design with custom coded tiers is going to scale alot better.
In the worst case, you can achieve it with GWT also with some up front design work (see http://timepedia.blogspot.com/2007/12/cloud-computing-and-gwt.html), where my GWT charting software also runs as a Servlet, an Android app, an Applet, and more recently, as Flash application.
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While waiting for volta, head over to http://jsc.sf.net and try my implementation out
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