Community Collaboration At Its Best: Google and Red Hat

Last week our developers attended the launch of Google Web Toolkit 2.0 (GWT) at Google’s Campfire event. We were truly excited to see the level of interest and participation in the event and feel that it’s a snapshot of what is really happening with GWT both in the development community and also for enterprise application of this technology.

Not surprisingly, GWT is a technology that has influenced many areas of the JBoss Enterprise Middleware product suite as well as projects within the JBoss Community. GWT plays a part in the strategy behind our JBoss Open Choice strategy which we launched this year at JavaOne. The Open Choice strategy was driven by customer demand and a desire for customers to pick and choose the best, most productive technology yet still be able to benefit from world-class capabilities and support. We seek to deliver on this strategy through products such as the JBoss Web Framework Kit and development frameworks like Seam which provides a GWT integration layer.

Providing world class support and packaging for our customers to leverage GWT in their own applications is just the starting point. GWT also enables us to extend our capabilities to non-developers within our products. The console for the JBoss Business Rules Management System (BRMS) utilizes GWT to assist business analysts in creating and managing SOA centric business rules across multiple enterprise applications. GWT also is leveraged within the JBoss Business Process Manager (JBPM) components to assist in the development of workflows and processes. JBPM is included in JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and leveraged in features in both the JBoss SOA and Portal Platforms today.

Our efforts to embrace and in some cases extend GWT are available through several JBoss Community projects. GateIn, our new portal project includes the ability for end users to easily create GWT widgets and portlet based applications and dashboards within a secure, personalized site experience. And our latest effort, Project Errai is a new GWT based framework that provides developers federated and flexible client side integration for next generation web applications.

Looking ahead we plan to continue our collaboration with Google, both in our community efforts and in leveraging the GWT technology for our customers. Stay tuned for more information on this strategic partnership.