Who’s using GWT?
January 21st, 2008 - Written by in Using GWT
I read this Dan Moore blog entry a couple of weeks ago where he asked this same question and it seems to come up quite often on the GWT developer forum as well. It is an important question to answer because it is one of the first things people ask when evaluating whether or not to adopt a specific technology. The Google Web Toolkit has now been out for more than 1.5 years, so what have people done with it in that time? I took a look at this older list by Mark Volkmann and a couple on the developer forum and came up with my own set of GWT applications I would use, if I was showing off GWT to someone else. Here they are (in no particular order):
Pibb
JanRain
Pibb is a GWT based web application that combines the best features of instant messenger, email, chat and message boards. It supports OpenID, a lightweight protocol, for single sign-on and portable identity.
GPokr
Ryan Dewsbury
GPokr is a free, multi-player Texas Hold’em game written by Ryan Dewsbury, author of the book, Google Web Toolkit Applications. GPokr runs tournaments which are held starting on the 1st of each month and continue till the last day of the month.
KDice
Ryan Dewsbury
KDice is another free, multi-player strategy game by Ryan Dewsbury. It is based on Taro Ito’s Dice Wars. Gameplay in KDice is a simplified version of Risk with the primary goal being to defeat your opponents by conquering the entire map.
/
Google
Although I can’t tell by looking at their source, according to , Google is using GWT as part of their Google Base and Google Checkout applications. If Google themselves won’t use GWT, who else will?
QueWeb
Queplix
QueWeb is a commercial open source web application which provides a Customer Care solution for businesses. You can play around with their demo here.
ContactOffice
ContactOffice
ContactOffice is a professional, “virtual office” which allows users to easily manage their data (emails, contacts, meetings, etc). The beta version of ContactOffice was developed using the Google Web Toolkit. Check out the demo here.
OpenKM
Josep Llort
OpenKM is another commercial open-source document management system which enables users to capture, publish, find and store electronic documents. Take a look at their online demo.
Dismoiou.fr / Tellmewhere
BaDTech SAS
Dismoiou.fr is a web application built with GWT that allows users to collaborate and create a common database of points of interest in the world. Users can share their favorite places, see them on the map, give recommendations and even provide pictures and videos.
Are there any other really nice GWT applications out there I missed? Feel free to leave a comment and plug any GWT based application you’ve seen or have been working on.
I’ll start things off by plugging myself.
http://www.gsudokr.com
Dude, that sounds…painful.
Thanks for mentioning our Beta version! You should check this video of Joel Webber:
http://blog.contactoffice.com/.....-gwt-team/
Another shameless plug:
http://traceurl.com
Drools (JBoss Open Source Rules Engine) uses GWT for its administrative console (alternative / complementary to the Eclipse plugin).
Really good example of GWT capabilities.
We’ve been using GWT successfully for over a year with our Yesmail enterprise product. This is a subscription-based email marketing app used by several large companies.
You can check out
,
the product page,
or one of the widget examples we’ve built using gwt.
Hi Chris
That’s pretty interesting. Will you be releasing the source to any of the widgets you’ve created to the community?
Definitely. I’m working on getting the rolodex thing into the incubator:
and hopefully we’ll be able to contribute more in the future.
Another example. Pinch Hitter Solutions is using MyGWT in their DatabaseEverywhere product.
http://www.pinchhittersolutions.com/products.html
hurray for shameless plugs!
thanks for the info Chris.
this entire site( page? app? what are we calling these?… getting a facelift, in effect soon! ) is GWT/Apache/Tomcat/MySQL on RedHat.
one big problem ( and show stopper, to some extent ) is getting the thing to index…. even google doesn’t index the things properly yet. Not so great for a media-centric site.
anyway, its a good example of a complete application and a somewhat stripped version is used by 2 clients.
regards
doh!
forgot to include the site…
goChongo
Hi,
My client has GWT used in two different ways. As is used to create widgets used around the main site, and the other is the user account application.
Basically, if you see anything that looks javascripty around http://www.cohomefinder.com, it’s probably written using GWT
.
Heres another example, the gwt app running from within an iframe. They also have a separate, private gwt app to administrate their system.
Click on the ‘as not seen on TV’ area or ‘community’ -> ‘Jones Interactive’ -> ‘myJones Video’
http://www.jonessoda.com
also reachable directly:
http://myjonesvideo.com
More plugs
We use GWT for the new version of our commercial OLAP and reporting tool:
http://instantolap.net/iolap25
Also, I set up a free fun-site for collaborative drawing with GWT:
http://www.farbtube.com
very impressive wiki by GWT
http://www.wibokr.com
We’re using GWT at http://riflethru.com/ for both desktop and iPhone/iPod Touch clients.
/dave
–
riflethru.com – More eBay, less fuss.
Using for a few weeks http://www.taskwriter.com, for implementing my GTD process.
One more big application ( project management + ..) with GWT client
http://projectkaiser.com:8080/pk/
[...] 5 GWT LibrariesGetting started with GWT and Google GearsHow to access Web Services with GWTWho’s using GWT?Book Review: Google Web Toolkit [...]
Here is another useful and free site that uses GWT http://www.mobical.net
Here is an Online Booking Engine written in GWT http://www.bookingpad.com
Here is an Experimental Community website written in pure GWT http://www.indiainmemphis.com
Here is a Chinese site using GWT:
http://www.payscale.cn
Yes ,it is the China site of http://www.payscale.com
This doesn’t even come up for me. What’s up with that?
Another shameless plug:
http://www.sendmehome.com
And our press release:
I built TheGlassEye.com for my photography business to look better and have more functionality than sites like SmugMug. I suggest viewing the Nature portfolio because it shows off the multi-paging support when there are more thumbs than fit on a single page. Be sure to click on the print sizes on the right in order to explore the very powerful image cropping options and live thumbnails in the shopping cart. This site is designed for resolution of 1280 wide and degrades gracefully down to 1024 wide and then again to 800 wide, swapping out panels and CSS for more compact versions as needed.
pentaho uses GWT too. It’s a open source BI aplication.
http://www.pentaho.com/
[...] Who’s using GWT? | GWT Site (tags: gwt) [...]
[...] complexity when writing an AJAX app in JavaScript has never seemed tough. So I wanted to understand who’s using GWT to try and understand what problem their using it to [...]
TimZon provides a video discussion solution aimed at helping enterprises collaborate across time zones.
We built it using GWT as the primary client solution (with a little bit of native Javascript and Flash).
Please check it out!
GWT just hava a look at this.
http://www.filestacker.com/qa/...../Home.html
Hi we have built a few sites with GWT.
Everything you wanted to know about your bands.
http://www.efanmusic.com
GWT+Spring+Hibernate+velocity
A semantic feed aggregator
http://www.feedzz.com
GWT+Spring+Hibernate+velocity
Learn language playing!
http://www.studylangs.com
GWT+Spring+Hibernate+velocity
A simple way to lear the irregular verbs
http://www.irregularenglish.com
Pure GWT
and more to come!!!
Hope you like them
easy-restaurant-websites.com also uses GWT.
GWT implementation of the brain training game dual n back
http://www.brainboffin.com/ running on app engine with a friend connect social bar
I made a little app that shows US election results and demographics on Google Maps, using GWT:
http://maps.webfoot.com/demos/election2008
See GWT in action powering our new hotel and restaurant matching community.
CCH/Wolters Kluwer has launched IntelliConnect – a GWT based Web Application
For those looking for a pretty significant product built using GWT please check out:
http://tax.cchgroup.com/default
Click on the IntelliConnect demo video.
This was a large development effort a few years in the making.
Anthony O
Another creative GWT site: Stick your photos on the endless (Berlin) wall and draw graffitis on them.
Another creative GWT site: Stick your photos on the endless (Berlin) wall and draw graffitis on them:
Graffiti 2.0
We are using GWT for our real estate map search and elsewhere on our site. This was built using GWT + Hessian + PHP + NTREIS data and represents about a year of development time, it is a fairly mature product.
Nalin Singapuri
Next Prodigy Inc.
Hi there,
right now we are building a leading real estate website for all of Northern Texas which is using GWT to first include some components on php side as you can see at
Homeprodigy Website
where the search box on the top right is fully built with GWT. And we have a 100% GWT part of the website, a dynamic map which filters over 60000 properties at real time to the many filters that you can set and displays all of them on the map even when you are way zoomed out at
Dynamic Map on Homeprodigy
I think that GWT is really a great technology, most of all being able to debug the code in the GWT Shell, the pain it takes from having to deal with the DOM and different browsers. What we learned during this project and having for the dynamic map already quite a huge application is the extensive of LazyWidget in order to instantiate the widgets only when they are needed. Especially for IE we had performance problems because of extensive equals() or equalsIgnoreCase() methods which we switched to the use of hashmaps.
Items that we are looking for would certainly be OOPHM and the possibility to set points in the code so that the GWT code could be loaded lazily and thus speeding up load time of our application.
Thanks for this great product and keep on with the great work!
Dominik
this is a new web site based on GWT
A risk clone game with Google Maps
Wwwar is a risk clone game with Google Maps.
GWT is wonderful technology!!! I try to implement “job site” using GWT+Spring+Hibernate. Unfortunately site is very hard for browsers and don’t indexed by Crawler
[...] or the Google Code blog. The community has started its own lists as well, such as those here, here and [...]
Simple, Fast and Elegant CRM powered by GWT
After playing around with other AJAX frameworks, I found GWT extremely easy to use, very well documented, and highly stable across browsers and platforms. The GWT team were quick to fix bugs and come up with newer releases. I developed a new site BizBuyLink, using GWT. The only drawback was that I had to workaround to do SEO, because JavaScript based pages does not appeal to search engines, including Google.
-Biju Damodaran
I came to this page with the following Google query: Why would anyone use GWT. Of course, this page is not actually answering that question, preferring to play the “who’s popular” game, instead. I frankly don’t care and won’t be impressed by how many people are using GWT. Instead, I want to know WHY someone would develop in Java when the end result is going to be JavaScript. Has GWT solved the cross-browser issue better than jQuery or Prototype?
Imagine that I told you that I’ve got a nifty set of libraries and a compiler so you can write in Ada and have it come out in Perl so now you can do all that CGI stuff using Ada. Why the hell would you want to do that?
Anyone? Why should I spend weeks of my life learning to use GWT?
The JavaScript GWT compiles is far mar optimised than the code you could write yourself. More optimised than jQuery and Prototype in fact as shown by the GQuery project which far out performs the original script library and with a tiny fraction of the download speed.
In answer to you question, you would spend time learning GWT to save yourself time writing fragile scripts that are not re-factorable or able to be statically checked.
Target Rooms – the cheap hotel map search was a breeze to write with GWT and includes features that never would have been considered if they had to be coded in JavaScript.
If the answer is merely that GWT produces JavaScript which is “more optimized” that I can write by hand, I’m not only unconvinced, I’m insulted. I started programming back in the days when I had to write my own device controller to get the serial port to talk to the modem and my own BBS software to talk to the world: all in ASM with just 32K of RAM. Don’t talk to me about optimization.
The significant issue for any app running in a browser is compatibility, not optimization. Using Java to spit out canned JavaScript is like whipping a wagon to get the horse to go.
You are missing the point. As far as optimisation goes – as the worlds most experienced JavaScript optimiser – you should recognise that downloading an entire jQuery library to us a couple of functions is not efficient. A compiled GWT program only includes optimsed, inline coded that is actually used. But the real gain to developers is that you are writing in Java with the worlds best IDE’s… not hacking a scripting language.
Using JavaScript to write anything complex is like whipping yourself while being trampled by horses.
If you believe in writing JavaScript without writing Javascript, don’t just limit yourself to public static void main Java. You can do it in other equally persnickity langauges. Why not write your JavaScript in Scheme using Scheme2JS? (define (scream x) (“Argh!” x))
What about writing your JavaScript in Ruby with
Or look sharp, feel sharp on Microsoft’s bandwagon by writing your JavaScript in C# using Script# -->. OUch. It’s very sharp.
There are yet more long-ways-around for a JavaScript-avoider, but I tire of finding them. The correct and efficient answer is to just pick a good package that solves the compatibility issues like jQuery or Prototype and get on with Ajaxing everything in sight. Who in their right mind is going to burn their eyes out worrying over avoiding a few K being downloaded in the age of video on the web? Get up to speed. It’s a megabytes/second Internet, baby.
Optimization aside, JQuery and friends are great for web sites that need a little DHTML.
But if your developing a web application then Javascript just sucks. Seriously. People that say different usually are ones that have not built complex Web 2.0 applications.
The most important power of a programming language is its ability to adapt to change. Java/C# has some of the best refactoring tools and has very consistent way of doing things (getters, setters, interfaces).
Renaming a variable or function in javascript takes so much valuable time even with unit tests.
The extra efficiency is very nice but as I wrote above – the main reason to use GWT is the tool support for Java. GWT is more than just a JavaScript compiler although that is a major component. The tools to debug your Java code _in_ the browser are essential and probably lacking from the projects you mention. The component libraries are also very good and frameworks for internationalisation and browser specific code rock. All in all it is a package that is hard to match without turning to Flash or Silverlight.
We have been working with GWT since 2008 and have successfully developed applications which includes a complex network management system . A testimony to how good GWT is that we developed a really cool interface quickly and without using JS libraries. Our favorite library for GWT is GWT-Ext.
Probably one of the biggest GWT Projects online.
SambaJAM
Team Collaboration Platform where the client is built entirely in GWT using GXT.
Executive Dashboards
Full Enterprise Content Management: Rich Thumbnails, Drag and Drop File System for Managing Documents, Workflows, Version control, Commenting
Wiki Pages
Discussion Boards
Tasks Management
Fast Search Tools
Sign Up for Free to see what we have done.
Performance tuning was challenging but we have done some good work.
[...] Who’s using GWT? [...]
I’m not a fan I GWT. Its cool, but HTML is a technology for displaying documents – anything else is a hack. I think Silverlight and to a lessor degree Flex/Flash are the future of LOB apps on the web. However… did you know that Sage Software (one of the biggest software companies in the world) are developing alot their new stuff around GDATA and GWT???
Thats the most credible thing I’ve heard around this platform.
A new application that is written entirely using GWT is RunInv. You can see a live GWT demo of it here (no need to fill in any forms etc, just one click will take you there):
http://runinv.com
Click on the green “Demo Version” button. It’s an application that allows small manufacturers to manage their inventory.
LogicalDOC is a multiplatform Document Management System (DMS) reliable and scalable, which can improve your business efficiency by helping you to manage, find and share documents.
Thanks to its elegant interface, LogicalDOC transforms complex operations into easy tasks.
The use of successful Open Source technologies such as GWT, Spring and Hibernate, makes LogicalDOC flexible and suitable to the necessities of organizations of any importance and size.