As I look back, almost three weeks after GWT.create, I can’t keep myself from smiling. It was, for several reasons, the best time I’ve had with the GWT community since I joined. Traveling between Mountain View in the Computer History Museum and Munich, meeting hundreds of GWT enthusiasts and exchanging ideas with them about how to make GWT even better made me realize how incredible this community is and how lucky we are to be part of it. Learning from their technical knowledge and their deep personal and business involvement with this toolkit, I felt lucky I got the chance to connect with some of the best engineers in the world. If you’re reading these lines and you spoke with me, I’m glad to have met you 😀
GWT.create this year was Arcbees’ chance to shine! We jumped in as major partner. Julien had two sessions: Best development practice for GWT web application and CSS3 and GWT in perfect harmony, plus one workshop on how to contribute to GWT, while I delivered a keynote plus one session: How to improve your productivity using GWTP. We had major news to deliver at the keynote, having taken some of our free time to develop a new brand and a new website for GWT. This will have huge impact in the future of GWT as we try to make the brand more modern and sexy to support the design goals for upcoming developments in GWT. We spent a lot of time to give you the best experience we can and we welcome any constructive comments that might make it evenbetter in the future. One major improvement that was made to the website, even before the rebranding, was the introduction of ability to contribute documentation right from the website using markdown and GWT. We’ve preserved this functionality and hope the community will help us maintain the documentation.
When David Chandler got on stage to deliver the second keynote, I got a little bit nostalgic. He was the one that invited Philippe Beaudoin (cofounder of Arcbees) to speak about GWTP four years ago, in front of an overcrowded room at Google IO focused on how to build online business applications. He also made a statement about how everyone in the community cares deeply about abstraction and architecture, which are the two concepts that have inspired me and the rest of Arcbees for years to contribute open source libraries and frameworks to the community, to help them build better web applications. I was also amazed by the huge amount of raw talent that this community has to offer, and saw great web applications from businesses like Ruxit, Boomi and Magnolia. I could go on for a while, but needless to say that we’re starting to have great, beautiful and mature web applications built on GWT, and not just Google offspring like AdWords, Sheets and Inbox.
During the first panel discussion, Ray Cromwell reminded the audience that GWT fuels the web applications that run the world. Stock exchanges, financial institutions, healthcare, airports, you name it. Whenever something needs to run on top of critical infrastructure, needs to be scalable and/or multi-platform, GWT is commonly seen. Javascript may have a lot of fresh cool toys to play with that GWT may not have (yet!), but would you invest everything you have on fresh cool toys? There’s a lot to learn from the Javascript community, but as decision makers, we need to choose robust solutions, not fashionable ones.
I got carried when I was writing this blog post and didn’t even started to write about my top 5 session/announcement, stay tuned early next week to know more about what was our top 5 sessions/announcement of the GWT.create 2015!
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