Teaching & Development Philosophy

Okay, one more post before I start writing some code.

My general teaching philosophy with this course is that we are learning how to develop web applications. We are not just learning GWT (which is the client side), and we are not just learning App Engine (which is the server side).

We're learning how those two tools (and a host of others) hook together to form a complete web application.

In these posts, I'm not going to cover the basics. If you're not in the course, and you're reading this, and you haven't done any Java Swing work before, head for a tutorial. That'll be important for understanding how to create a user interface in GWT.

There will probably be other things that I won't cover as well. I'll try to post tutorial links when I remember to do so.

Another important aspect of my development philosophy is that I favor having a working application at all times. I'm not going to write tons of code in GWT for the screens, and then move on to the server work. At every stage we will have a working application and full client/server interaction for the features we've implemented so far.

It may take a few blogs posts to get through a particular feature, but I believe strongly that having a working application is the best way to know if you're heading in the wrong direction early.

The first step of this project is going to be user authentication. At the end of that step I'll have a web server that can accept logins and registrations, even if it doesn't do anything else.

Okay, enough talking, the next post will start the technical bits. Promise.