Is potluck on?

For the past five years we have hosted a fairly regular potluck at our flat nearly every Friday night. It is not always on and every week I receive a series of emails asking about it.

In the past I have tried facebook events and mass emails, but they tend to push the event into peoples face and take too long to set up for someone as lazy as myself.

So I created this site: Is potluck on? It is fairly basic, though does the job as required. I already have people clamouring for RSS feeds and iCal URLs. I had an ulterior motive.

Update 2019-05-19: Is potluck on is no longer running, sorry

The site is written in GWT and provided me with a method of experimenting with GWT’s model of client and server side development separated by RPC calls. GWT is effectively a Java -> JavaScript converter which will automatically turn your Java code into a AJAX enabled website. It automatically deals with cross site compatibility and provides a fair amount of flexibility.

I particularly liked that the Java model of the underlying JavaScript DOM was complete but pretty much hidden, instead users work directly with real (well, more like a model and less like a node) Java objects to create a functioning GUI with the same style syntax that those familiar with SWT, Swing and AWT are used to. It seems to avoid having huge amounts of boiler plate code and can produce good results if coded carefully.

My next goal in this area is to learn about how to develop for GWT on a more larger scale. I think it will take lots of planning and experimentation.