>> Hi, I'm here at Google I/O with GoGrid. And would you please a little bit about yourselves
and you go ahead. >> SHEEHAN: Sure, I'm Michael Sheehan and
the technology evangelist for GoGrid. >> KITAGAWA: And I'm Justin Kitagawa and I'm
a senior technical product manager at GoGrid. >> And so, what is GoGrid?
>> SHEEHAN: GoGrid is a Cloud computing infrastructure provider. And we provide a variety of traditional
data center type of components like load balancers, servers, Windows and Linux in storage but
we do it in a Cloud. And so, it's on demand, dynamically scalable, billable by usage. And
the really neat thing is that it's all accessed through a Web browser.
>> And so, what kind of name you guys are using for the Web client?
>> KITAGAWA: We use GWT, the GWT to build our rich internet applications. And so when
we're building on GoGrid we're going to be redefining server technology. And we knew
that we wanted to have a really full-featured console. And at that time we were looking
at other AJAX applications and we wanted to kind of push the potential of what we're doing.
And so, the idea was to kind of create a thick client application inside the browser. And
with GWT we've been able to do that. >> Was there any technical reasons why you
chose GWT than with other, it got--well, it's similar but it's not exactly the same--or
like JavaScript libraries? >> KITAGAWA: Yeah, so, when we first started
building it I myself had--I've been building applications for a really long time and I
had been using a bunch of different toolkits. And I've used YUI in the past and I've use
Dojo and GWT actually had just come out. And you run into a lot of obstacles using other
toolkits. Oftentimes what will happen is some of them are, for instance, like a Scriptaculous,
it's kind of cool animations or something and so forth. But you really can't do anything
other than the animations that they give you. YUI has some amount of functionality that
you can change and tweak but it's a little bit limited. Dojo, very rich, but it's also
very unconfigurable. You can really only use it in the way that they want you to use it.
And, really, if you need to change something it's very difficult. Even if you know JavaScript
and you're going to the source code to try to understand it, it can be a nightmare. There
are case statements if it's an IE or if it's Firefox to do something right. And oftentimes
like even in the demos, we'll go to a demo and it works great in IE but then you go into
another browser and it just doesn't work. And so, the beauty of GWT is in its inter-browser
operability. You can really code it once and it works across the browsers. I often talk
about how difficult it is to build an application like GoGrid inside the browser. We use a lot
of layers. We need to know exactly where things are positioned on a screen to be able to position
and center things properly. And to do that effectively you need to have a consistent
way to even understand like where it is on the screen. And using GWT it has really allowed
us to unlock and I often say this is that if you dream it or if I dream it we can build
it with GWT, and so, it's very cool. >> And so, it seems like you have a lot of
experience with GWT and JavaScript and is there anything that you'd like to share other
in involvements any tips and tricks? >> KITAGAWA: Yeah, I really liked--there are
a lot of things within GWT--really the dome classic I think it is just great. The dome
extraction within GWT and you're just able to--they have made it in a very clean way
that you're able to essentially really do anything that a browser is capable of doing.
In my last interview I have spoken of that preview. And I think that it is also another
untapped, an untapped feature that not a lot of people use. The history support is also
really nice as well and just being able to make sure that the back binding works properly
and so on and so forth. >> Has the Web community been helping with
you in, you know? > KITAGAWA: Definitely. I love the forums
and our teams uses them all the time whenever there's an issue or a bug or some things more
often than not you can just go up and ask a question or get a lot of insight in some
of the forums have been really great. The blog itself is actually really helpful too.
I find a lot of helpful links checking periodically, sometimes even thinking about something. And
I, in fact, I know that in--last time I was asked this question, two things that I was
asking about Comet support and Maven integration it was literally a couple of months later
that they just started to pop up and some good legs came on the blog and so.
>> And so, it's like you're looking at the new features? What new features in the latest
release are you willing to sign over? >> KITAGAWA: One of the things--GoGrid is
a very rich application and there's a lot of Tabs and it's very full-featured. And so,
the code separation and being able to split out the JavaScript code so that it can be
broken up into chunks and then downloaded kind of on demand that seems to--I'm really
excited about that and we'll definitely make use of that, also the need of hosting and
so being able to debug in the Web browser that also looks to be very exciting as well
because right now we kind of have to compile and browse and you can actually step through
the code. And so, it will be nice to be able to do it so that if you see a bug in a particular
browser you'll be able to kind of clear up. >> Is there anything else that you'd like
to add? >> KITAGAWA: Now, I'd like to thank the team
for keeping on producing a great product. >> SHEEHAN: And for inviting us to the show.
>> KITAGAWA: Yeah. >> SHEEHAN: And being in the showcase.
>> Thank you for coming. >> KITAGAWA: Definitely, and so, thank you
very much. >> Great, thanks for the good time and that
you're here with us at Google I/O. Let's go out.
>> SHEEHAN: Thank you.