GWT Conference: Joel Webber on Architecture Best Practices

Dietrich Kappe, Wednesday, December 5, 2007 @ 7:01 pm

Joel tackled a tough subject, IMHO. Talking about architecture in the absence of a concrete application that you want to convert to GWT (and that's what most of the folks here are looking to do), you end up giving fairly general prescriptions and best practices. The areas of focus were:

• data model (consider client and server state carefully and how to synchronize them, embrace asynchronous communication)
• application structure (break up large -- huge! -- apps, one module per page, work the single pages into the history stack, )
• browser history (not doing history breaks user's expectations of a webapp; define what a location is for your app and how state is represented; tokenize it and use GWT's history mechanism)
• simplify your server (make it stateless wherever possible, then you can scale)
• authentication (we didn't get to this)

Billy Hoffman called Joel out on the state to the client stuff and the security holes it opens. The response: be careful what state you put on the client, but much of the session state doesn't really need to be in the session. Given the audience response that followed, I think Billy can start printing money.

All in all, it seems that best practices for GWT applications are still evolving.

Some more Joel quotes:

"We used to call this DHTML, but it has a fancy new name, so we call it Ajax."

"When you move all of your session state into the client, it is usually possible to have essentially stateless servers. A stateless server gives you free scalability. However I can't help you with your database."

Technorati Tags: ajax, gwt

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