Building GWT on Ubuntu.

After GWT was building, some of the test cases would fail. Most of them would simply exit with empty test logs. Of course this to had nothing to do with GWT. The default installation of Hardy includes libstdc++6 and the firefox libs included with GWT depend on libstdc++5. This was and easy issue to deal with (with some help from ssolka) except for wading through piles of output from ant -debug and junit.showoutput to get the problem to reveal itself.

“Locking assertion failure”... WTF?

I tried to build GWT today on a Ubuntu system. Compilation was failing during benchmarkviewer and was complaining about a “Locking assertion failure”. Well, come to find it, this of course has nothing to do with GWT. There is some sort of problem with how the JRE was built. Anyway... way to many rabbit holes later, I got on the right track and and found the fix.

sudo sed -i 's/XINERAMA/FAKEEXTN/g' /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.15/jre/lib/i386/xawt/libmawt.so

In Atlanta Babies Sun and GWT!

I went to Atlanta at the beginning of January for a week to see my brother’s first baby!





While I was there, I was able to attend Sun Tech Days. For the most part, the conference was a snore but hey, it was a free event. I did meet some cool folks like Stacy Thurston. He was teaching an AJAX fundamentals training course during which he was kind enough ask me to speak to the class about GWT. I am not an expert or anything but, I am willing to play the evangelist role for a few minutes. It’s always neat to see people’s reaction to debugging real Java code executing in the browser.

One thing that was a amusing at the conference was when Gosling dropped the f-bomb in front of a whole room of conference attendees. He unapologetically let it out while responding to a comment about how saving a compressed image in Python takes one line of code while in Java it takes a couple dozen.





I had almost given up hope on the GWT developers hosting a meet-up that I had suggested. But they pulled it together and gave several folks the opportunity to meet most of the GWT development team. It really is great that they are willing to make contact with the community and share where things are going.

I have always been uninterested in what is actually happening IN the browser. Because of this, I have gravitated toward typical server-side development (Servlet-derived stuff, ORM and the like). I enjoyed MFC development earlier in my career and I am one of those weirdoes that think Swing development is fun (SWT would be extra-cool but it doesn’t seem like the most marketable thing to look at). Web applications are great to work on until I had to tweak crap for a browser to look good.

I have gotten hyper-juved about GWT. Utilizing the browser to achieve a richer user experience is not a new thing. What is new (for me) is being able to take a traditional software engineering approach to the code that actually executes in the browser. GWT is the first technology that has made this possible for me.

Here is the ironic bit… Getting into GWT has made me get really interested in all of the traditional browser-centric technologies! The stuff that made me wince before is now strangely appealing. JavaScript and CSS are at the top of my “list o stuff to assimilate”. Is it possible that this is really the hidden agenda of GWT? “Yeah first we will get all those Java snobs interested in writing Java in the browser… then they will get a taste of JavaScript and CSS... then they will stop being babies about browsers.” Of course I am not serious (accept for the part about Java snobs like me being babies about browsers).

Initial impression of GWT in Action

I have spent some time reading GWT in Action. This book is actually very well written and informative. I have read through chapter 3 and have already gotten the benefit of being introduced to a couple of facilities that I had missed when working with GWT on my own (like the internationalizations capability to create constants and messages interfaces… not a big deal but a sweet little piece of functionality).