Screaming Penguin

For those of you that use Google Wave (crickets) , you can now cooperatively solve crossword puzzles with your friends with Shortyz for Wave .

I finally got around to upgrading the penguin server this weekend, it wasn't without pain, but it's done. I was running an ancient version of Fedora there, and have now installed the latest Ubuntu server (9.04). Everything is working again, I think.

Gwittir 0.4.5 is available. This will be the last release before some major, and possibly breaking changes later this summer. Release Notes JavaDoc Running Sample (Now with VIEW SOURCE Technology!) Please note, the new Gwittir requires the Gears library as a dependency to build your project.

I just checked in a bunch of new stuff in to Gwittir svn based on stuff I have been working on lately. In order of increasing interestingness:

• Base64 : Self explanatory
• MD5 : Self explanatory
• HistoryTokenizer : A class that can be used to manage multiple tokens in the anchor slug.
• StringUtil : A wrapper for String utilities. Right now it is just [to|from][Utf8|Utf16]ByteArray() methods. This fills a badly missed hole in the GWT java.lang.String implementation.
• HuffmanEncoder/Decoder: A client-side compression library. It also includes HuffmanString, a GWT-serializable string that can be used for long text data. Please note, this is a special case. You should generally rely on either the RemoteServiceServlet's or Apache's GZip support.

And the big one for now: The html5db.* package. This one provides access to the SQLLite implementation is Safari and on the iPhone. You can look over a basic example here of using it. I will post more on this later. But this will not work in hosted mode. Because the Safari embedding library did not allow people to set the SQLLite quota externally, your code will only work after it has been compiled at the moment. I will try and put together some mockability for hosted mode sometime soon.

So this is the first big new thing in a long time. It stems from some work I was just recently doing. So, basically there is a problem with GWT's basic RPC: If you are trying to send back large blocks of data or you are trying to deal with medium sized chunks of data on a machine with limited specs the cycle of "Read all data in on the server -> Serialize -> Send To Client -> Deserialize -> Render" can take large amounts of RAM on the server to deal with the request, and large amounts of time on the client to deserialize and set up the UI. Enter the StreamingService.

GWT-Maven From the group: release notes for 2.0-beta26: Address these issues (includes the patches): http://code.google.com/p/gwt-maven/issues/detail?id=172 - doubled classpath entries http://code.google.com/p/gwt-maven/issues/detail?id=176 - same/related to 172 http://code.google.com/p/gwt-maven/issues/detail?id=173 - resource filtering

There is a ton of new stuff in the new version of GWT-Maven. I just thought I would give it a release notice here because it's a significant update with many issues resolved and a different approach to a few key features.

It's a crapload faster at launching the shell

It supports GWT 1.5.2 from the Maven central repo

Automatic setup and extraction of the GWT native libs is now handled a more Maven-y way

GWTTestCase support was rewritten and is a bit more robust

So I have been hacking away today at Android-Maven. It's far from perfect, and I sure still have a hell of a lot to learn about Maven2 (and Android), but it at least is a starting point - it can build, install in the emulator, and run an Android app.