Berger-Levrault is a major firm in the field of the French public sector management and legal publications printing for over three centuries.
Early 2007, we decided to use a GWT frontend backed by a Hibernate/Spring server stack to build our new Financial and HR software offer. As far as Berger-Levrault is concerned, this represented a deep change as we historically used proprietary environments (Microsoft® mainly) to code our products.
Since then, the architectural model I worked on became the firm most advanced and promising technical stack and is now the environment of choice for most of our new projects. Moreover, we are working on a SaaS offer for our GWT products as the firm is undergoing a deep evolution towards open source environments.
These applications are currently deployed in many large and middle-sized French cities intranets : we have more than 50 clients for the HR software only and we started also several other projects using the same technical environment.
Many factors contributed to this success and the way we implemented GWT in our development model represents a significant part of these factors. In France, the firms that have realized significant R&D projects can gain a financial help : we presented our GWT implementation, which has been reviewed by experts, and it brought us a significant amount of money. In addition, this implementation provides us a development environment which lets developers crank up a web 2.0 SAAS ready application in matter of hours.
Being the lead developer of the GWT implementation, I am pleased to share some of our technical highlights and things we are proud of as a team.
André Morassut – R&D Engineer – 07/2011
