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by Kasper Weibel.
Original Post: Google Web Toolkit goes AJAX
Feed Title: Weibelmedia - Food for Thought
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Yesterday ArsTechnica reported that the Google Web Toolkit (GTW) in its first official release as of May 16 is incorporating AJAX support for Java programmers.
I have not tried GWT out but Google explains on their site that.
Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a Java development framework that lets you escape the matrix of technologies that make writing AJAX applications so difficult and error prone. With GWT, you can develop and debug AJAX applications in the Java language using the Java development tools of your choice. When you deploy your application to production, the GWT compiler to translates your Java application to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.
This sounds pretty darn good if you are a Java developer. Apparently it's possible to combine existing widgets into new ones and distribute them as .jar files. The debugging possibilities are also quite sophisticated.
The list of features is long:
Dynamic, reusable UI components
Really simple RPC
Browser history management
GWT lets you make your site more usable by easily adding state to the browser's back button history.
Real debugging
Browser compatible
GWT applications automatically support IE, Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, and Opera.
Interoperability and fine-grained control
You can mix handwritten JavaScript in your Java source code using a JavaScript Native Interface (JSNI).
The widgets that GWT initially supports includes hierarchical trees, tab bars, menu bars, and modal dialog boxes. This suggests that one of the areas where GWT will become popular is amongst those who are writing desktop application like interfaces for the web.
It's a smart move of Google to position themselves as suppliers of AJAX tools for the Java market. Google was one of the first companies to leverage the AJAX technology by using it extensively in Gmail and I would expect their AJAX technology to be relatively mature compared to other suppliers'.
In a single move Google has taken AJAX into the heart of the enterprise.
I personally believe that we will soon see a surge in fancy AJAX applications on the websites for many of the enterprise size companies who are committed to Java.
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