Google AJAX API (GWT and such and such)

As was to be expected, Google kept on promoting its AJAX API. GWT was the big star here, which as you may know features a Java to Javascript “compiler”. I’m not really into GUI development (I like to mess with the business and data tiers instead) but I’m a big AJAX fan nonetheless (for one thing, it’s not flash =P). Still, GWT seems to me a bit limited. It’s code generation is neat, but as I see it, you can’t do AJAX if you don’t do AJAX, that is, if you don’t handle de requests by yourself. I still can’t find an AJAX API that I am satisfied with. Maybe I’m just to picky, I don’t know. Ok, so that was my excuse not to enter the AJAX conferences.

Android

Ah, Android, I know thee well. Since I have been messing around with the API since the SDK went prerelease, I tried to avoid the Android 101 talks. In the introductory talk, they showed what Android was capable of. In very short words, Android is Google’s iPhone. Sure, it’s (or will be) open source and more of a defined stack and standard to be followed but Apple’s influence is really there. One thing that provoked ‘Ohhhs and Aaaahs’ is when they accessed a San Francisco street in Street View and panned through it by actually panning the device (as if the device was a window to the street). This is very showy for sure, but as tech critic I must say that it is not that hard to do. I mean, it’s been a while since accelerometers got their own software abstraction and became easy to use, so the real technical achievment there is Street View, which is not Android’s. Of course, since most of the guys at the conference are web devs, so they may not know that (please don’t get mad at me =P).  The interesting stuff came when they talked about the DalvikVM which modifies java’s bytecode so that it becomes more efficient in both CPU and memory consumption at certain times (I just loved to see mmap and malloc mentioned, it was refreshing =). Some things may be tweaked before version 1.0 and you can see that the team is still making some crucial decisions. So Android’s still in Zygote stage (pun intended), I’ll just wait for its birth =)