As previously mentioned, Jeanne and I will both be presenting talks at TheServerSide Java Symposium exactly one month from now. Here is a preview of two of the topics I will be discussing at my talk “GWT Roundup: An Overview of Google’s Web Toolkit and Hybrid Integration” : GWT Image Bundles and Speed Tracer.

1. GWT Image Bundles

One of the more interesting features that GWT offers, beyond what most developers using indirect Ajax frameworks could build on their own, is the concept of Image Bundles. Even GWT developers who use Image Bundles may not have any notion of what is going on under the covers because the implementation details are so well abstracted. The idea is to take a large group of images and combine them into a single image with an interface for accessing each image. This may sound like a strange notion, but the performance advantages of doing so are manyfold:

• More responsive UI since all images are downloaded together
• Faster than downloading them individually since they are not downloaded in serial (HTTP 1.1 limits number of outgoing connections to 2 per domain)
• Bundles use less bandwidth than separate images since multiple image headers are reduced to a single header

2. Speed Tracer

New to GWT 2.0 is the ability to validate such non-functional requirements as user interface performance, using the Speed Tracer tool, a Google Chrome extension. For example, if a particular asynchronous RPC call is causing delays in the user experience, Speed Tracer will help you identify it. Speed Tracer provides two graphs that show user response information and offers “hints” of spikes in response time that could be causing problems in your application.

• Sluggishness Graph: Shows UI responsiveness
  
• Network Graph: Network activity and latency
  

See you in Las Vegas!

I hope you enjoyed this preview of the talk I will giving next month. I will also be taking part in a panel hosted by Cameron McKenzie called “Client Side Development Smackdown” . Oh, and it’s not too late to register for TheServerSide Java Symposium 2011. We hope to see you there!