Google has just released their Google Web Toolkit, a development library/toolkit for web applications which supposedly powers Google lines of products. It is still in beta, but available for download. It runs on both Windows and Linux.
First of all, it is very different from Yahoo’s User Interface Library. Not just the look and feel — from the examples it looks like you’ll get that “Google app” look ‘n’ feel. It is different with its strategy of code-generation. Instead of importing Javascript files inside your HTML, and code it the Javascript-way just like all other AJAX libraries, GWT wants you to develop your software in Java, and cross-browser compliant Javascript code and AJAX components will be dynamically compiled from your Java classes.
Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don’t speak browser quirks as a second language. Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatabilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript’s lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile.
Yes, you heard me right. You can now have fun writing multiple modules of strong-typed Java with full of its messy setups, so that it can generate dynamic-typed Javascript. Hmm. Less code. Yeah right…
I guess I would like it more if I am still doing web development in Java. I understand that Google is a Java/C++/Python company, and from their point view it makes sense — good debugging environment, familiar language, etc. But limiting GWT to JDK would surely limit its usefulness to the others in the web development community.
Update: James Tauber asked about Python’s equivalent to GWT, and comments provide helpful links to other similar projects. Now that’s less code!
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I’m sure they have their reasons for releasing it as Java-based. And with this news, the new surge of developers have migrated back to Java and new developers are popping up everywhere because of their affinity for all-things Google. So what tie-in do Google and Jave have? I’m sure this story will develop.
Michael,
I am not sure about the relationship between GWT and “the new surge of developers have migrated back to Java”. It is way too much pain with so little gain, besides you are locked into Google’s own technology.
Google is a great company, but I do not see developers everywhere idolising them.
As of Google and Java, AFAIK Java is one of most commonly used language in that Mountain View company. See GvR’s article after he started working in Google.
I am not qualified enough in any of those languages to make any further educated speculation or comment (not that my first one was so). Thanks for the link to GvR’s info, I’ve read through some Python materials in the past few months, learning the basics, and this helps reinforce my need to understand more. Thanks!