Examples of Google Closure apps outside of google?

We use Google Closure (the compiler, the library, and the templates) quite extensively at Monetate. I'm afraid the most visible example of that, Monetate '11, is only available to our customers -- but there are at least some videos of it in action on our site, such as the ones at http://monetate.com/2011/08/say-hello-to-monetate-11-website-marketing-reinvented/ . Everything you'll see there, in the top video, is implemented in Closure on the frontend, and powered by a JSON-RPC service on the backend. (Full disclosure: I'm the awkward-talking tech lead in the bottom video :-)

So far as suggestions go, I highly recommend Mike Bolin's book, Closure: The Definitive Guide. We started prototyping (both in Closure and GWT) some months before it was published, and I have to say that it would have been a lot easier for us if we had our hands on a few of those chapters in the early days, particularly the one on Components. (Components are key!) I also highly recommend Ray Ryan's Google IO talk on best practices with GWT. Yes, it's about GWT, but it's also one of the best talks out there on "Rich Web Applications," and there are plenty of things that carry over to Closure. Two big ones that come to mind are (1) the importance of event buses and MVP, and (2) getting your history management right from the beginning.

Hope it helps -HJB

Zoosk uses Google Closure. I think that one reason why Closure is mostly used in-house is because it leans more on the side of handling the complexity issues of large scale web 2.0 application development over ease of use or quick learning curve. As more tools become available for building Google Closure apps, I think that you will see more adoption outside of Google. For example, there is an application generator that creates Google Closure apps from UML models.

http://TinySocialBox.com

Tiny Social Box uses Google Closure Extremely Heavily. All pages in Tiny Social Box are only made of Google closure.

If you see the networks of request and response in Tiny Social Box, you'll realize that there is only a single js file. So loading a page in Tiny Social Box is pretty fast.