Insert Witty Irony Here

Wednesday January 16, 2008

Is Javascript the C of the Web

Last night, while the wheelers and dealers of MySQL, Sun, Oracle and BEA were signing on dotted lines the tech crowd was at Google's building 43 for the Silicon Valley Web and Java Users group meeting to hear a presentation about GWT.

Bob Vawter's presentation was excellent. He covered the basics quickly and took questions. His presentation provided answer to some of the things that make folks go, "Hmmm", when they look at the output of the GWT compiler.... Like, "What are all those obtuse numerically named files all about?"
Short answer (heavily paraphrased): They are the Javascript of the UI that you created in GWT, pretailored for each of the four major browsers out there today. The names are created from a hash of their content and are safe and easy to cache. When you change the UI, the name of the files will change, so folks don't keep seeing an old UI and have your server side processing freak out because of missing data.

There was a raffle for a number of books. I won a book.

Why does this entry have its title?

While Bob was talking about GWT, it reminded me of working at Interactive Software Engineering, now known as Eiffel Software. The Eiffel compiler used a similar "trick" of transforming a strongly typed language (Eiffel) into a weakly typed language (C). From the outside, it looks like GWT is doing something similar with Javascript playing the part of C.

Another parallel between GWT and the Eiffel compiler was the amount of optimization it could do. After expressing his sample in a rich language, Java, the compiler optimized almost ALL that richness out of the resulting Javascript code... making it much leaner.

(2008-01-16 21:18:17.0) Permalink