Tuesday, June 13th, 2006
GWT in the Wild: Mortgage Calculator
From Colorado Homefinder comes this real-world example of GWT to implement a mortgage calculator. CTO Anthony Francavilla says it was the perfect opportunity to try out GWT - a self-contained project and “something useful we could put into production right away”.
The team will be blogging about their experiences and the first installment is already in at Dan Moore’s blog.
- In general, I was less than impressed with the Google provided documentation, but very impressed with the GWT group.
- It was very easy to quickly develop using Eclipse and the hosted web browser.
- The HTML of the file you’re developing to lives under the src directory (all the way down in the public folder).
- All the javascript and html are compiled into the www directory.
Are there any other examples of GWT out there? It was mentioned at the time of public release that there aren’t yet any Google projects using it, and it’s not clear if Google’s intention is to use it in-house.
3.9 rating from 28 votes
Hey.. This useless “application” as an GWT example? I think there are better samples somewhere, which couldn’t be replaced by one hand-coded one-liner in javascript.
[…] Blog Name: Ajaxian Article Title: GWT in the Wild: Mortgage Calculator From Colorado Homefinder comes this real-world example of GWT to implement a mortgage calculator. CTO Anthony Francavilla says it was the perfect opportunity to try out GWT - a self-contained project and “something useful we could put into pr… […]
Yep Martin, it’s a pretty simple app, but that’s the point! We are evaluating GWT and wanted to start simple. Given how new GWT is there are few samples out there, so we thought we’d document getting something up in running in GWT, and provide source code.
Dan his second installment up on his blog with the app getting a little more complex:
http://www.mooreds.com/weblog/
In the second version we are pulling the mortgage rates from the back end database using JSON. We’ll keep incrementally adding complexity and documenting it along the way. We really hope this is useful for others out there evaluating GWT. Enjoy!
Hi Martin,
I agree that the first revision of this application is relatively ‘useless’. After all, as I note in my blog, there are a ton of other mortgage calculators out there, some of which are very sophisticated.
But the first revision is not the stopping point, and I’ve always found when looking at new technology that it is better to crawl before I try to run. When we are done building the final application, I hope you’ll find it to be more useful.
Once upon a time Sun developed trivial PetStore applications using EJBs. Afterwards everyone start to use EJBs even for trivial application. Two years later we get “EJB is crap” movement (or even “J2EE is crap”)
Personally, I cannot see real value of using GWT-like technology for JavaScript application development. But your example shows where it should not be used, definitly :)
Valery, please understand we are evaluating GWT to see if it’s a fit with our application. We are documenting this effort and providing source for the benefit of the AJAX community, many of whom are interested in GWT also. We are a small Java development team looking leverage a large existing Java code base and to avoid reskilling in javascript. At first I was a little shocked at the resistance to GWT, but now I understand: it’s a good old programming language flame war. What fun! Don’t worry folks there is more than enough code to be written in this world in every programming language. It’s just a whole lot easier if you pick the right tool for the job, thus our evaluation. :-)
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Refinance Mortgage Loans or get a Debt Consolidation Loan or Home Equity Loan Online by comparing up to 4 competing lenders. Use refinance.net’s Mortgage Calculator or have Refinance.net help find a lender that can you save thousands of dollars per year.
Anthony,
Can i see the app you were telling about …I could not find on that blog page…
“Dan his second installment up on his blog with the app getting a little more complex:
http://www.mooreds.com/weblog/”
Thanks
This is a great site and will help me with my economics final paper. Thx guys!
“From Colorado Homefinder comes this real-world example of GWT to implement a mortgage calculator.”
Mortgage calculators are OK. But why not check out how you can use a Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC) as an interest cancellation account to accelerate your home’s equity and payoff the loan *years* sooner than listed on the mortgage amortization schedule.
Remember, is home is not an asset until it has been paid off “free and clear” — until that time, it is just a (very large) liability.
Today’s Real Estate market means that folks can no longer count on appreciation to build home equity. Those who realize that they need to pay down their current mortgage debt are looking for alternate ways to aggressively (yet safely) build equity.
And they’ve discovered a perfect online system to do that; they can focus on their wealth accumulation goals while accelerating their equity simply by using a Home Equity Line of Credit to ‘power’ the Money Merge Account™ financial solutions program.
A typical 30 year loan (of whatever type) can be paid down in 1/3 to 1/2 the time — it’s a great way to save *huge* amounts of income by eliminating a mortgage amortization front-end interest load. (On a million-plus dollar home, I’ve personally seen where the Money Merge Account™ program will save the homeowner $750,000 in interest charges!)
And the best thing – homeowners don’t have to refinance their existing mortgage or, in most cases, make any adjustments to their lifestyle.
It is unfortunate that most of us were never taught to follow three essential principles: (1) Avoid paying interest, whenever possible, (2) Use other people’s money, whenever possible and (3) Find and use a financial system that will guide you, especially if you have the tendency to go off-track. The Money Merge Account™ software and the program’s counselors use these principles to keep each homeowner focused on their wealth accumulation goals.
I’d be happy to provide further details…
A good mortgage calculator is the one who gives a lot of details, you can check http://www.maracal.com , i think it is the best.
Pretty cool stuff. Quicken Loans has been doing some pretty cool stuff with ajax and some of their mortgage calculators. Check some of them out, they’ve got a whole list of them: https://www.quickenloans.com/mortgage-calculator Another cool thing Quicken Loans is doing with mortgage calculators is an entire financial tool called Quizzle. Lots of cool ajax effects, and very helpful financial and mortgage tools. Check it out at http://www.quizzle.com