Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

I had the good fortune of spending a bit of time, over the course of a few days, with Stephan Janssen at the Java Posse Roundup this year. He is a great guy, very cool to hang out with. His slides of the failed theme names for Javapolis are hilarious, as is the Gosling idol video.

One of the most interesting things he spoke about, aside from the fact that American's don't like sperm, is the approach Parleys is taking to putting three leading RIA technologies to the real world test - by implementing the site in JavaFX, Flex, and GWT. (You can find the Flex BETA if you poke around, the JavaFX version works, I have seen it, but I don't think it's a public URL, yet - and the GWT version is still in the works, last I heard.)

InfoQ has a nice interview with Stephan today that explores his experiences with the different RIA offerings, it's a good read. Stephan Janssen On Parleys.com And The RIA Landscape

One of the things that he and I both hit on and expressed at the conference was that if you use a common backend structure, DTOs, set of services, etc, then you have the flexibility to do different front ends. That is the approach they have taken with Parleys, using a REST style backend service layer, and it has worked out great - in Stephan's own words. It seems obvious right, but not many people actually do it - that is not many actually extract the back end to an agnostic set of services.

Lately I think a backend AtomPub stack, backed by Java, is the way to go. Then on the front end my preference is GWT with service servlet wrappers - I think an all HTML/JavaScript approach has a lot of advantages over Flex, JavaFX, or Silverlight (which Stephan also mentions, but personally I find irrelevant, just say no thanks to the lock in). Those advantages include running on virtually any device, from the start. What's that I hear, no Flash on the iPhone, it's a big debacle? My GWT apps run there already, as do they on my Wii, and on any other machine with a non crippled browser (mobile or not).

Regardless of my preference though, once you abstract the backend, the client is less important - and then an approach like Stephan has used, Flex, JavaFX, AND GWT is not only doable, but not all that difficult. (Adobe also has AIR, which is very nice, but AIR can run HTML/JavaScript, so theoretically GWT or any DHTML/AJax also, it's not limited to Flex - to its credit.) If you have the agnostic RESTy backend, then you can also roll out native mobile clients (such as Android, and iPhone), without too much trouble - you don't have to repeat yourself.

All in all I agree with the approaches Parleys has taken, and with Stephan's GWT sentiments:

After the painful multi browser/OS DHTML/Ajax experience, I'm starting to appreciate more and more the GWT strategy.

We have a first GWT prototype of the Parleys.com client. It looks very nice, and it works without tweaking it on different browsers and Operating Systems. So, Google does deliver on its promise, as you would have hoped from the Google brain power.

Developing new components is a bit more of a challenge, and there I'm hoping that a vibrant GWT community will continue to grow and deliver more UI components. Once we release the GWT version, it will be interesting to observe what our viewers prefer. I'll keep you posted.