Building SOFEA Applications with Grails and GWT

In early 2009, Matt participated in a major enhancement of a high-traffic well-known internet site. The company wanted to quickly re-architect their site and use a modern Ajax framework to do it with. An Ajax Framework evaluation was done to help the team choose the best framework for their skillset. The application was built with a SOFEA architecture using GWT on the frontend and Grails/REST on the backend.

This talk will cover how Matt's team came to choose GWT and Grails, as well as stumbling blocks they encountered along the way. In addition, we'll explore many topics such as raw GWT vs. GXT and SmartGWT, the GWT-Plugin, modularizing your code, multiple EntryPoints, integration testing and JSON parsing with Overlay Types.


About Matt Raible

Matt Raible has been building web applications for most of his adult life. He started tinkering with the web before Netscape 1.0 was even released. For the last 13 years, Matt has helped companies adopt open source technologies (Spring, Hibernate, Apache, Struts, Tapestry, Grails) and use them effectively. Matt has been a speaker at many conferences worldwide, including ApacheCon, JavaZone, Colorado Software Summit, No Fluff Just Stuff, and a host of others.

Matt is an author (Spring Live and Pro JSP), and an active "kick-ass technology" evangelist on raibledesigns.com. He is the founder of AppFuse, a project which allows you to get started quickly with Java open source frameworks, as well as a committer on the Apache Roller and Apache Struts projects.

Matt has had quite a ride in the past few years, serving as the Lead UI Architect for LinkedIn and the UI Architect for Evite.com. He currently enjoys life as the Chief Architect of Web Development at Time Warner Cable. More About Matt »