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by codeboost 5371 days ago
Agreed. Today's technology - CoffeeScript + Backbone.js + node.js-ish backend would make it a lot easier to develop something like Wave in a couple of months by one or two developers (plus maybe a designer).

Looking at the app I'm building (alone) with these tools, I could say that it's on par with Wave on the realtime UI and complexity, but the development experience is a really pleasurable one. These tools are crafted for exactly what I'm doing and it seems like they know what I want to do before I want it.

But then again, back then you didn't have these tools so I guess you had no choice but to go the 'academic' Java way.

But anyway, congratulations on this incredible achievement and also for the many lessons learned and shared with the world.
1 comments
Maro 5371 days ago
Those technologies probably don't scale well in terms of hiring.

Also, those technologies probably don't scale at all to 1000s of servers, something a Google project has to do from day 1.

(I'm not sure they'd even be fast enough on a single server. As a rule of thumb, the more technologies you put in the mix, the more abstractions there are, the harder it is to minimize the work done.)

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josephg 5371 days ago
Yes. We did work to make wave scale before we knew what features would be important to users. That was definitely a problem, but its hard to avoid scaling when you're google and the whole world is watching.

The earlier you launch, the sooner you need to do that scaling work. But the later you launch the more development you do in a vacuum, without real customer validation.

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codeboost 5370 days ago
I guess you're talking about node.js . That, of course is a hot topic today, but I'm confident that this problem is solvable. That's why I called it 'node.js-ish', meaning a backend that can do similar things as well as or better than node.js.

CoffeeScript and Backbone.js have nothing to do with scale, as they are used on the front end.

The author talked about how horrible it was to have the UI written in Java (having to wait 3 minutes for a recompile after a CSS change). These two tools (plus SASS and alternatives) on the front end makes Java->Javascript totally redundant, imho.

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