Taskwriter.com is a Get Things Done (GTD) app and an excellent example of what people are doing with GWT. I first saw the app mentioned by Debbie, a Taskwriter user in the comments of my Who’s Using GWT post. So I contacted Viorel Spinu, and I asked him if he would like to introduce his product and share with us his experiences in developing Taskwriter. Viorel is a managing partner at Sety (http://www.sety.ro), a Java focused company which offers consultancy and development services, while also developing their own set of products.

I want to introduce to you our latest product, http://www.taskwriter.com, which is a “getting things done” focused online tool that we have just put online for a few weeks. At the beginning of May, we have decided to create a GTD tool able to answer two quite contradictory requirements. It has to be online, for the sake of portability, but it has to be really fast (desktop app like). GTD is about productivity. Spending 4 seconds each time waiting for the server response when saving a task, this really makes you feel unproductive.

Given the two opposite needs, we had to go for something that runs browser side and GWT is one of the few technologies that gives you that. It gives you the power of Java (full OOP, thus easy to maintain code) running on the client side.

TaskWriter is designed in such a way so that all data is loaded on the client side when you start the application, and then every interaction that does not require to go to the server is executed client side only. To view the details for a task, to apply the filters, to open a task in edit mode, these are performed without going to the server at all. Even when you perform a save operation, the data is first updated locally and shown on screen, and only after that it is sent to the server in background. This gives you speed. I doubt we would have been able to achieve that without something like GWT behind. Pure Javascript would have certainly been pure nightmare.

If someone would ask me to choose only one reason why we have chosen GWT, I would definitely answer “being able to develop browser side application using Java”. All other features would be more or less simple to achieve with other tools.

For the user interface, we have decided for the simplest thing that would get things done. MyGWT seems like a very good choice when starting this project, so we have adopted it enthusiastically. At this moment, after MyGWT being merged with Ext GWT, this decision has proven to be unfortunate. I am now definitely decided to stay as far as possible from Ext GWT. Their slalom between licenses is something that gives me no confidence in going with them. Therefore, we will get rid of MyGWT soon and probably go for in-house development instead.

Now we are still in working on development at full speed, just a few of the features that are keeping us busy : task printing, version for mobile devices, email and SMS integration, Google Calendar integration, task sharing and offline working with Google Gears.

We are committed to “user driven development”, so keep an eye on our blog (http://www.taskwriter.com/blog) and feel free to suggest the features you need.

Thanks Viorel! If you have a GWT app that you’ve developed and would like to be highlighted on this blog, please .

Lots of new GWT apps this week.

• The Tombs of Asciiroth
  An old school puzzle/adventure game built using GWT. Also uses Google Gears for saving your game and there’s an Adobe Air version as well.
• Brightpages.com
  An online yellow pages directory. They recently ported their site over from Struts to GWT.
• Chosr
  Quicksilver for the web. If you’ve ever used Quicksilver on the Mac, you’ll recognize this neat little GWT app.
• GWT, GWT-Ext and MIME/Multipart Forms
  A blog post discussing a workaround when using GWT-Ext file upload.
• ScURLr
  A screenshot generator tool built using Google App Engine and GWT. You can use this to take screenshots of any web url.

I just noticed that the new GWT 1.5 RC2 build is now available to download. You can grab it from . Below are some of the notable enhancements and bug fixes from the release notes:

General Enhancements

• Added support for the contextmenu event, which allows users to detect and override the browser’s default context menu
• Improved performance of NumberFormat
• Added support for altering the number of decimals in a currency in NumberFormat
• Improved performance of Animations
• Improved the appearance of the default GWT style themes
• Improved the Showcase sample with more robust examples and more language translations
• FormPanel can now wrap an existing form and still submit it to a hidden iframe

Fixed Issues

• DOM.getAbsoluteLeft/Top() and DOM.eventGetClientX/Y() no longer log an exception to the console in Firefox 3
• Fixed a memory leak in Internet Explorer
• DOM.getAbsoluteLeft/Top() now takes into account the margin and border of the target element in Safari 3
• Fixed some bugs associated with history support

There are also some changes in this build that may affect your existing GWT applications so make sure to check out the full release notes for details.