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!

“PHP and Ruby are perfectly fine systems,” he [Gosling] continued, “but they are scripting languages and get their power through specialization: they just generate web pages. But none of them attempt any serious breadth in the application domain and they both have really serious scaling and performance problems.”

As far as I have understood PHP’s “share nothing” scalability strategy, it basically tries to “do nothing” and heavily relies on database. It works for many web based applications but not all. Well, Ruby does a bit more than web page generation, but I understand he probably meant Ruby on Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson’s baby. David responded in Pay no attention to the heathens:

Heh. I love quotes like that. You don’t even have to add commentary. Just imagine a puzzled face with raised eyebrows.

DHH — there are more software in the world than web applications, and even for web applications there is more than executing CRUD operations over relational database.

Interesting description about Java:

Java is much more programmer-friendly than C or C++, or was for a few years there until they made just as complicated. It’s become arguably even harder to learn than C++…

How true! Java, the language itself, is simple and easy to understand — at least the first few incarnation of it. However, over the years when the standard JDK gets bigger and bigger to download, the built-in libraries gets incredibly huge, and just the sheer complexity to set up a J2EE server. It has turned itself into a beast now, and no one now can claim that he knows the “Java API”. Which one? You ask.

Or maybe it is just me who cannot get my head wrapped around Java. Used to make my living in Java 5 years ago, but am too scared to touch it now.

PHP is certainly easier to use, and much faster to develop a site with. The language itself left a lot to be desired, and even with PHP 5.1, it still feels like some ex-Perl scripts hacked together templating HTML files. I guess the evil of “backward compatibility” has somehow hindered how the language can evolve. But that’s not the point — it is simple. It gets the job done.

People might think that scripting language without n-tier application server architecture is not scalable (can we say IBM? thou some might beg to differ). Even Andreessen himself would have his Java application server clusters behind the PHP web server layer.

But that’s not the point. Why would “scalability” be important anyway? At least not in this Bubble 2.0 Web 2.0 world. You just need to have some nifty idea, quickly build the app, make sure it is buzzword compliant, be the first on the market and hope the VC will knock on your door.

Still implementing your J2EE solution? You might finish when Burst 2.0 arrives. Give PHP, Python or the Rails a try instead.