When creating large web applications with GWT, it’s not always clear how to get started. The most important (but most difficult!) question, I’ve found, is exactly how to structure the project – i.e. what justifies creating multiple web applications, multiple GWT modules, multiple EntryPoints, or everything all in one. Although there is plenty of discussion out there (here, here, here, and here), the general consensus is still a little muddy. Like anything in our business, it seems the “right” answer is “it depends”, and so in this post I hope to highlight a few of the factors in this decision.

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As a technology consultant, each project brings new challenges; this is what makes our job so appealing to those of us that love it!  However, one of the hardest things I believe is keeping up to date on the latest happenings with the many technologies we are asked to implement on a moment’s notice.  It’s pretty common at Summa that we might be working on a Java project for months or years, and then be asked to jump onto a .NET or IBM project with little to no downtime in between.  Now most of us have perfected the art of “ramping up” and I do not intend to discuss that in this post (that might be a good future topic), however, I believe our ability to get up to speed quickly on a technology is directly related to how well we know the state of the market.  This is what I will try to discuss and I will offer what I believe are the best ways to stay “up to date” in whatever areas you choose.

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We often hear things like “paying for quality is worth it” or “buy a quality product if you want it to last”. With products where quality can be measured easily (using measures like average life of the product, service requests etc.) it is easy to confirm the validity of these statements. But in IT consulting do these quality selling mantras make sense to our clients?

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During my early years of development I only knew of one way locking was done by source control systems (SCM), and that was pessimistic locking. Before modifying a source file you have to ‘lock’ it, so that nobody else can modify it at the same time (hence the pessimism). I had heard about optimistic locking, but purely from an academic standpoint and that approach did not seem practical to me. One day I had to use an optimistic based source control system: Subversion (SVN). Although at first the change of paradigm was not smooth, nowadays I have been converted into an optimist. This blog is about my experiences transitioning from pessimist to optimist and why I now prefer optimistic locking.

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