Another cool tech demo to run in Chrome

Thanks to Benjamin Joffe for another great example of Chrome’s speed.

For those who are interested in testing out the speed differences between Chrome and your other browser, I’ve found another variation on the “Wolfenstein” like demo running in Javascript.

It looks a little nicer and even has a “mini-map” to show you where you are in the level.

And yes, for me it runs much better in Chrome than Firefox.

See Ben’s demo here.

Chrome for Mac next, Sorry Linux; Plus New Developer Tools

Speaking at Web 2.0 Expo, Google’s Ojan Vafai talked about Chrome coming to the Mac before Linux due to size of each market.

Maybe more interesting to the non-Mac users were Ojan’s comments about “soon to come” Chrome developer tools to make it easier to develop in Javascript.

Perhaps there will be a set of standard Chrome libraries to handle all the Javascript necessary for UI elements like dialog boxes and toolbars.

When a platform has great development tools that make developer’s lives easier, more time can be spent on creating new features.

Way to go Google!

More detail on Ojan’s talk from Larry Dignan at ZDNet here.

Google’s Chrome Browser + Google Web Toolkit = Matching Pieces of the Puzzle

Another piece of the puzzle about Google’s Chrome browser fell into place for me as I was doing the research on a development project.

Chrome was built to be run web applications very quickly. During the announcement they mentioned how it was designed to run Javascript quickly.

With this in mind, I started thinking about fast and easy ways to develop great Javascript applications. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I decided to see how Google approaches Javascript development.

Funny thing happens when you search on “google javascript”. Google’s first listing is the Google Web Toolkit aka GWT.

Wikipedia says GWT “is a general set of tools for building any sort of high-performance client-side JavaScript functionality”.

Interesting huh?

Now if I only had a “server” to host, deploy and scale my web apps…

Wait, can you say “Google App Engine” which was released this past spring?

So we now have a great web app development environment, a server to run the web apps and Chrome to display the user interface on the customers computer; what’s not to like?

All good news for a browser like Chrome built specifically to run Javascript well.

PS – Yes, Google App Engine only supports Python for now, “with other languages to come,” but I’m betting in the not to distant future, we’ll see an announcement of a connection between GWT and the Google App Engine platform.