Author: Renat Akhmerov

This example is a live code that demonstrates the FastContainer pattern described in our article “GWT: improving performance”. The goal of the example is to research setInnerHtml phenomenon more detailed and to see concrete results in milliseconds. Besides that I am going to consider a few important aspects of the real implementation of FastContainer pattern. You can see working example at http://www.stravati.com/examples/fastcontainer and download its source code from http://www.stravati.com/examples/sources/fast-container-demo-src.zip.

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Authors: Renat Akhmerov, Sergey Dryganets, Alexey Kharlamov

Since the public introduction in August of 2006 the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) has gained significant momentum among web developer. The technology allows to build very interactive and responsive applications using convenient and very sophisticated tools as Eclipse, Maven and SVN. Moreover the GWT aims to build cross-browser applications by isolating platform specific quirks.

Our team has used Google Web Toolkit since the 1.1 release. While we are very happy with overall development experience we have found several performance limitations of the library. Actually, the limitations originate from restrictions inherited from the HTML layout algorithms and browsers implementations. In this article we will try to offer ways to workaround these limits by using more effective ways of HTML manipulations.

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Recently, Google Widget Toolkit attracted attention of web developers from all over the world. GWT is a great technology for AJAX development actually. It helps to get rid of many head-aches associated with cross-browser development, user interaction and development cycle.

The library provides unprecedented possibilities to build Web 2.0 applications with high level of interactivity. And there is a trap.

Often, the user interface of web-applications is simpler to build than desktop UIs due to two factors.First, the HTML/CSS ecosystem provides for a great number of tools to easily express designers vision.
And there is no need to build/run/debug cycle for the web-pages. Second, HTML provides for a significantly lower level of interactivity that is encapsulated by browser. So developers don’t need to debug each.

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