Overview
This is an attempt to build a feature-rich, open source sports team portal with Google Web Toolkit/Google App Engine while adhering to best practices and recommended design patterns.
Every aspect of the implementation will be covered here and hopefully someone will read this blog and learn, provide feedback, ideas and suggestions on what's going on. We will also investigate and evaluate different technologies and frameworks that will be posted as articles during the course of this project.
If you are new to this blog, please read the pages under "The Project" to get an idea of what the goals are here.
Note that I do this on my spare time, so this project will span over a pretty long period of time. If you have suggestions, feedback or ideas on existing or future posts/investigations, feel free to contact me.
News
January 18, 2011: A new GWT/GAE book has been released. Here are the notes from the author.
Writing an app with GWT and GAE can be challenging. This book shows
how to build an app step by step an touches lots of useful topics such
as UIBinder, CSS resource, client bundle, Remote Procedure Calls (RPC)
with error handling and automatic retries, JDO, data store design,
join-like queries, one-to-one and one-to-many relationships,
pre-persist callbacks, transactions, Memcache, event bus, traditional
MVP, MVP activities and places, server push with Channel API, Cron,
task queues, XMPP, session management, authentication with Google,
Twitter and Facebook and much more.
Check it out at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1849690448
A sample chapter
http://theconnectr.blogspot.com/p/sample-chapter.html
Full book info:
http://theconnectr.blogspot.com/p/what-you-will-learn_26.html
October 18, 2010: I now live in Sydney, Australia and recently joined NeonStingray as mobile tech lead.
July 5, 2010: Updated the datastore feature table for SimpleDS 1.0 RC1. I also want to make a short announcement. I'm leaving for Australia in september where I'll be staying for a year to work and travel. I really wish I had the time to keep this blog in momentum and up to date, but there is so much else going on in my life right now. I have been getting topic suggestions from lots of people here. If anyone wants to help out with the blog and write articles about GWT/GAE development, let me know and we can discuss it.
May 15, 2010: Part 10 on gwt-platform posted. No code checked in or available as part yet. There will be a Part10-12 download available later.
Apr 25, 2010: No, I haven't died or joined a monastery in the Himalayas. I've just been working a lot and haven't really had the time to write stuff here. I have however spent some time today to reflect over the MVP situation and have decided to throw out gwt-presenter and gwt-dispatch in favor of gwt-platform. I will explain the reasons for this in the upcoming post, but you might want to check out the project yourself in the mean time. Kyle Baley wrote a blog post about this for his project here. The datastore frameworks post will be delayed some more since I want to spend some more time working with TeamScape instead of articles right now. I have practically made up my mind about which framework to switch to already, but I need to do some further investigations before I write about that.
Mar 27, 2010: The interview with the authors of Objectify, Twig and SimpleDS has been posted. Great reading material for anyone who is using Google AppEngine.
Mar 19, 2010: You might have noticed that the updates have been rather infrequent lately. I have some other things going on that have required my attention, but I hope to get back to TeamScape in a week or two. The article about the datastore frameworks is prepared; I'm just waiting for the input from the authors and then it will be posted. The first article will mainly be about the interviews and some feature comparison between the frameworks. I have also started working on the second article where we will solve some code scenarios with each framework and I will write about my experiences on this. All this will eventually lead to a new teamscape part where we throw out JDO and integrate one of these frameworks.
Mar 10, 2010: If you are following the development of gwt-presenter, you have noticed the discussions about places, subplaces, lazy load of presenters ,etc. Philippe Beaudoin, owner of the PuzzleBazar project, has done some interesting work with MVP in his project. I'm fairly sure that our current MVP architecture needs some further enhancements, so I'm keeping an eye on what's going on in this area.
Mar 4, 2010: I have some exciting news. I have been in contact with the authors of SimpleDS, Twig and objectify and they have agreed to participate in a discussion which will form the foundation for a future post where we take a closer look at their solutions. The authors will get the chance to discuss design choices and implementation details among other things. We will also look at some typical persistence related scenarios and how they can be solved using the different frameworks (as compared to JDO). There are several reasons why I think this is a great idea. First, these frameworks get the exposure they deserve. Second, I hope it can be of help for new GAE developers who struggle with the datastore and JDO. Hopefully an overview and comparison such as this will help them find the right tool for their needs. Feel free to contact me if you have any suggestions related to this.
Feb 17, 2010: I plan to look into code splitting later. Found an interesting article about this here if anyone is interested and wants to evaluate it before I get to it.
Old news removed.
Domain up and running
The domain teamscape.se is now up and running and the latest deployed version can be found at http://dev.teamscape.se. Note: Might be some downtime during the weekend as I'm changing dns records and associating the domain with Google Apps.
The MVP pattern parts have also been posted.
