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Google updates Web Toolkit to 2.0


By Alex Handy
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December 10, 2009 —  Google has long seen Java as a better JavaScript. The company's Google Web Toolkit has been translating Java into JavaScript for developers for over two years now. Yesterday, the company updated the toolkit to version 2.0. This new version brings the Google Chrome browser into the mix for debugging purposes, and introduces the ability to chop code up into bite-sized snippets for use on the client end.

Andrew Bowers, product manager for GWT, said that this release was all about speed. GWT 2.0 improvements, he said, can be divided up into two categories: those that make development faster, and those that make applications run faster.

“We've seen that JavaScript performance has increased dramatically over the last 12 months,” said Bowers. “We're seeing functionality moving into HTML itself, with HTML 5 and CSS 3; bottlenecks are occurring not just in JavaScript, but elsewhere.”

To remedy this, Bowers and the GWT team built Speed Tracer, an optimization tool that runs in Chrome and can be used to determine where in an application slowdowns are occurring.

“It's a Chrome extension that's a little different than some of the existing tools that focused on a page as it loads," he said. "Speed Tracer is designed to watch an application over time. It's also designed to bring simplicity.

"Other profilers would give you reams of data, but not show you where to look. We give you two graphs: sluggishness and network. The network graph is overlaid on top of the sluggishness graph so you can correlate that with network speeds."

That information can also be coordinated with the steady stream of narration Speed Tracer provides. Bowers said that each action performed by the server, from rendering style sheets to pulling down XML, is listed as it happens, so when things slow down, developers can see exactly what's being processed in the browser and causing the slowness.

GWT 2.0 also includes a new modular declarative UI builder called UiBinder. This, said Bowers, came from an internal desire at Google to be able to build websites graphically without changing the underlying application code.

Of all the changes in version 2.0, Bowers said that the new code-splitting capabilities required the most raw computer science know-how. Code splitting began as a part of the Google Wave project, where the client-side Google Wave application was growing at a slow rate.

“We needed a way to get the time from startup to application faster," said Bowers. "What code splitting does is it just downloads the parts of an application when you need them. Does your application have a settings page? There's no reason to download it with the initial JavaScript download for the rest of the application."

Code splitting can be guided by developers, but it is automatically executed by the GWT compiler. Bowers said those algorithms were difficult to create and represented the most challenging part of GWT 2.0.




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