Augmented Reality in the Browser (Development)
A demo application of in-browser (plugin-free) computation.
Using WebRTC, WebGL and NyARToolkit (compiled into JavaScript with GWT), the web app is capable of doing real-time video filtering and marker-based augmented reality.
This is the first sample of marker based augmented reality in JavaScript and, quite interestingly, the code is capable of sustained 60+ fps on a common desktop computer running Chrome or Firefox.
Special care has been taken to let mobile devices to run the application and, with just a few adjustments to the UI, Picshare is usable even on Android (unfortunately mobile Safari does not support WebRTC so there's no way to use it on iOS).
Picshare uses Imgur API to store pictures taken and is hosted on a Google App Engine.
As a side note, the code of the AR engine and the WebGL library used to build the application have been open sourced and are available on googlecode: https://code.google.com/p/gwt-nyartoolkit/ and https://code.google.com/p/gwt-webgl/.
Mgwt2g (Development)
http://mgwt2g.appspot.comOne of the best choices for developing mobile-ready web (HTML5) applications in GWT is MGWT (https://github.com/mgwt/mgwt). MGWT is a library that allows for interaction with touch events, AppCache, and gestures from Java, and provides a lot of well-crafted mobile widgets.
As a part of a teaching session for the development team of a company, I worked as a consultant. I developed the adaption of MGWT for gecko devices (Firefox OS) to show the flexibility of the toolkit and let the developers experiment with the internals of a pretty complex library.
Gwt-mqqt (Development)
https://github.com/jooink/gwt-mqttNowadays, browsers allow full-duplex communications channels that let web applications communicate in real time, but on the other hand, embedded devices are a growing source of data that frequently needs to be accessed through the web.
To showcase the interaction between a web application (written in GWT) and an MQTT server (the de facto standard for embedded devices messaging), I developed this library that wraps a Paho JavaScript client (http://www.eclipse.org/paho/) and allows bidirectional real-time communication through websockets from Java code.
OpenAFS & GWT (Other amazing things)
http://connect.portici.enea.it/p96906779/I did a talk about using a web application to interact securely with OpenAFS volumes. In the talk, I describe the structure of the web app that keeps credentials as well as the changes to the Linux kernel's module needed to allow secure token passing in a multi-threaded scenario.
The GWT Toolkit: Build Powerful JavaScript Front Ends Using Java (Publication)
The GWT Web Toolkit, formerly known as Google Web Toolkit, is a set of development tools for building and optimizing complex browser-based applications using the Java programming language. What makes GWT not "yet another Java tool to write web apps," is the fact that the heart of the toolkit is a compiler that converts Java into JavaScript, enabling developers to write front-end web applications while leveraging all of Java's strengths.
How GWT Unlocks Augmented Reality in Your Browser (Publication)
In our previous post on the GWT Web Toolkit, we discussed the strengths and characteristics of GWT, to mix Java and JavaScript libraries seamlessly in the browser. In today's post, we would like to go a little deeper, and see the GWT Toolkit in action. We'll demonstrate how we can take advantage of GWT to build a peculiar application: an augmented reality web application that runs in real time, fully in JavaScript, in the browser. We'll focus on how GWT gives us the ability to interact easily with many JavaScript APIs, such as WebRTC and WebGL, and allows us to harness a large Java library, NyARToolkit, never intended to be used in the browser.
