robjsoftware.info

[ObNewBlogIntentions] Will try to update often. Will try not to spend so much time farting around with templates that I never get around to posting. [/ObNewBlogIntentions]

So, with that out of the way, hello. I’ve been planning a blog for a year and a half now. I realized in early 2006 that I’d spent my whole life programming for companies who owned everything I did, and I wanted to do something open source on my own time. So I thought, what about a blog system? Clearly the world needs more of those 🙂

(The nice thing about programming on your own time is you don’t have to justify anything to anybody! Except your wife. But if you cut back on the computer games, so you’re not blowing your personal time budget away, then it’s all good.)

The thing is, I really wanted a blogging system that would support offline editing and offline backup of my blog content. I ride the commuter train, and I don’t entirely trust any single system (even one run by Google) — I like lots of redundant backups that I personally maintain.

So I started on a project to implement a distributed blog application. Which, of course, since I’m a Java weenie, meant that I really needed a Hibernate-based peer-to-peer distributed object version control system.

I built most of that over the bulk of 2006 (or prototyped it, anyway), using a Seam / EJB3 / /Tomcat / JSF stack. Then I thought, how do I build the UI? I started looking into GWT and liked it. I even found a JSF / GWT integration library. But it didn’t handle GWT RPC properly.

Then GWT got open sourced. I started working on fixing the RPC issues in GWT in early 2007, and that led to my submitting what I think was the first major external patch to GWT. I also put together a demo of Seam + JSF + GWT — adding a GWT blog-reading interface to the Seam blog example.

Michael Yuan from JBoss mentioned this at his JavaOne BOF this year, and I got to demo it at the GWT hack session at JavaOne, where I had the pleasure of meeting Bruce, Joel, Kelly, Bob, and the Dans (Peterson and Morrill) from the GWT team. Then I took a couple of weeks off to recuperate — my wife is expecting our second child in late July (our first child is two and a half), so there’s plenty of other distractions keeping me busy!

So that brings us to yesterday. Google Developer Day in Mountain View. And the announcement of Google Gears and GWT for Gears. Now, remember that my original use case was to build a blogging app that could work offline. I was using a technology stack that was Seam + EJB3 + Tomcat + JSF + GWT + Postgres. So to use this app I was building, you’d have to be running a local Postgres install and a local Tomcat install, and you’d have to do a bunch of Java deployment. I might have wound up with a few dozen users, or maybe only myself. (The code could have wider applicability, but direct product usage would’ve been low.)

Along comes Gears. Suddenly there’s a whole new stack option: Gears + GWT + Blogger. Offline functionality usable with any Blogger blog, and a much, much, much easier deployment, with a possibly much larger user base as a result.

So yesterday at GDD07 I brainstormed about this a bunch with Dan Morrill, Miguel Mendez, and Bob Vawter from the GWT team. It looks like a go. My next post will be about the detailed plan for that.

Meanwhile I still have to finish landing the JSF+GWT code, and documenting and submitting the Seam example. This whole project has been one surprise after another, and it’s only getting more fun so far 🙂

Onwards!