GWT an hour in.

After having read a reasonable amount about GWT it was time to start getting my hand dirty.

Avoiding the whole XML defined UI stuff I created a simple UI in code and attached callbacks to buttons and so on. Guess what it is much like the other UIs I have used and I only avoided the XML side of things to get myself started. After my experience with android I really like using XML to define UI components.

There does not seem to be built in support for the HTML canvas but that is not suprising as I am not sure if canvas is supported in internet explorer. You can use canvas from the incubator project. Canvas is pretty important to me as the project I want to do requires drawing a lot of objects and interconnections between them. Canvas seem ideal for this.

Overall a thumbs up from someone who has been getting his hands dirty for only about an hour or so!

On my to do list is

1. Integrate canvas
2. Look that the performance of GWT for doing pretty intensive calculations.
3. Learn how to "thread" these intense calculations so as to not block the UI and cause the browser to complain. I would prefer to not do calculations on the server.

All this is experimental/figuring out stuff out before I decide to commit to the project in a meaningful way. Given the speed at which browser seem to progress and the gradually declining share of internet explorer I am not at all worried about targeting HTML5 particularly given the target audience will be tech savy.

I am not going to reveal what my app is going to be about other than it is about sound. My main concern is whether the compiled Javascript will get the performance required.