New developerWorks Articles: DWR and Google App Engine

This week, IBM developerWorks published two new articles that I wrote. The first article, is the third of the three part series I did on Ajax toolkits. This one is on Direct Web Remoting or DWR as it is commonly known. I had always been skeptical of DWR because of its RPC nature. However, after doing the article, I have to admit it is a pleasure to use. In the article I used the Java Persistence API (JPA) in combination with DWR. I was very pleased with being able to simply annotate some very simple, vanilla code and create an Ajax service that talked to a database. Ruby on Rails often seems magical to people in its ability to very easily work with databases and simplify Ajax development. DWR shows that you can do some pretty magical things in Java, too. DWR also makes Google Web Toolkit’s RPC code look ridiculous.

Speaking of Google (that is called a segue, if you are keeping score at home) the second article is the first of a three part series on the Google App Engine. I had mentioned some of the work on this here, and now you can read all about it on developerWorks. Of course you can also check out the application developed in the series, i.e. the aggroGator and you can get its source code here.