I wrote a little tutorial showing a simple way to exchange data between a GWT client and a PHP server. Source is included as well as other tools to make it simple to implement. Part 2 ends with instructions for getting a quick start to see how simply such an arrangement can be made.
Part 1 discusses the client side. Part 2 discusses the server side.
I hope this guide will help you get a start in using the awesome Web Toolkit.
This is a topic that is not well defined, and doesn’t seem to get that much coverage in the GWT developer forums. I found a few tricks that got me going in my own projects.
I use PHP in a couple of ways: with apache on my PC, and on a hosted server. On my PC, I’m only running apache/php, the hosted server includes MySQL. I decided to use GWT to implement a better user interface for some new functionality on an existing project. This included passing data between the server and the GWT client, debugging in hosted mode, and making queries to the database.
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I have spent the past few weeks getting into Google’s new Web Toolkit. It is an awesome way to write (mostly) cross-browser compatible applications. I found AJAX and other such tools to be a very interesting concept for making browsers into smart applications, rather than the traditional approach of smart server/stupid broswer. But I’m not interested in getting into the details of writing javascript that works with every browser that visits my site. Enter GWT.
GWT is a library and tool set that allows you to write an application in Java and then compile it into obfuscated javascript which will generally run safely and identically across most browsers. It works best under IE, but their FireFox support is also pretty good. They should be closing in on releasing an update which would include several bug fixes and some improved implementations of various things… The developer forum has a ton of discussion on such issues.
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I subscribe to Google alerts for a variety of subjects, including starter interrupts. It had been months since there had been any notices. Suddenely, a couple of weeks ago they started coming in citing a variety of newspapers. It turns out there was apparently one story which was sent out via the Associated Press and that article was repeated in many places.
This is interesting. It really shows how what looks like a trend or development of a serious interest is only a single source article. Reading the article and knowing something about the subprime lending business, I can also say the article was not especially useful.
In particular, the quotes from the “consumer advocate” were extremely un-informed. It was clear that he has no experience with the sub prime automobile lending market or he would not have made the comments he did. Perhaps he was miss-quoted?
He was quoted as saying the starter interrupts took all the risk out of the loans. He sort of forgot to mention
1. The customer abuses the car and then defaults
2. The customer drops the insurance and then totals the car
3. The customer bypasses the starter interrupt and keeps driving
4. The customer skips town with the car and it can’t be recovered
plus many others. Installation of a starter interrupt device helps the lender get paid, but to say it removes all the risk from the transaction is wrong!
I have added a section to the site to discuss pictues and photography. In brief I think the advances in computer and imaging technology are poised to overturn the current stock photography model. Photoshop, a digital camera and some website publishing savvy all a single person, with miniscule overhead, to do almost everything the whole stock photography industry provides.
I have some plans for this myself, involving all those negatives from pictures of the American Southwest I have accumulated over the last 30 years.
Stay tuned.
In my search for better, quicker, easier ways to develop content rich websites I happened across an ebook called “Getting Rea;” by a company called 37Signals.com. It got me all excited because they are much farther down the path toward developing the kinds of websites I had dimly imagined.
Their sites are built with a programming language called Ruby. They have used Ruby to build a website development framework called Rails. The combination is Ruby on Rails and abbreviated RoR. I have added pages to this site where I disucss my experinces with RoR in more detail.
Once the initial excitement wears off, there are some significant hurdles. It is harder to find a webhosting company that offers it, there is a serious learning curve, and the setup and install features still have lots of rough edges. However, it looks very promising.
We have been feeling constant and increased pressure to take our website development to the next level. Our customers and visitors to their websites expect the site to remember who they are and verify the forms they complete are filled in correctly and mistakes corrected without reentry of data. They also expect a professional look and feel. (Whatever that means.)
We have been building static sites with Dreamweaver. However, you probably noticed this part of Driven by Curiosity is done with Wordpress. We are finding the freedom to write first and organize/catagorize later is wonderful. In fact I started to write this on the static pages of the website and got to frustrated to continue.
I find the Wordpress approach especially friendly when I have a mass of information about which I want to write, but don’t yet have it completely organized in my mind. On this part of the site I can write a series of articles which are only loosely related and then add the categories that provide structure later.
I need to explore this further.
I keep six honest serving-men,
They taught me all I knew;
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
~Rudyard Kipling
Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton asked why. ~Bernard Baruch
The cure for boredom is curiosity.
There is no cure for curiosity. ~Dorothy Parker
I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious. ~Albert Einstein
Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.–Marie Curie
The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything except what is worth knowing.–Oscar Wilde
When curiosity turns to serious matters, it’s called research.
I almost thought I had something working yesterday. I haven’t worked out the issue yet, but I’m seeing signs of life. I got and installed the baluns and chip antennas… My 802.11 access point died and confirmed that it was polluting my receiver, as I get CCA=1 now. I figure that for test purposes, I should run the CC2500 as close to 2.45GHz as possible, as that’s the center frequency for the balun/antenna. That way whatever rotten impedance matching my rework causes should be partially compensated by maximum performance of the components.
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I was a little hasty in my board design. I did NOT do sufficient design of the RF section on my boards. What I find really funny now is that it’s much more obvious to me than it was previously. In lieu of a design, I copied the matching network from the CC2500 datasheet then copied some F-antenna from somewhere else. Not smart. 
Looking at it now, the matching network is a 200 ohm to 50 ohm balun, the antenna is something else, although I really don’t know what. And the other prototype boards I’ve seen with a similar antenna have very different matching networks. Hmm… Oh well. It probably would have been clever to look around more and figure out how to do a 200 ohm folded dipole as suggested on the CC2500 datasheet.
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