AJAX Magazine: Google Web Toolkit, Making AJAX development easier : Mobile Edition

Published on 2006-05-17 08:25:10

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is the new AJAX implementation provided by Google, 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. Now you can develop your front end in the Java programming language and use the GWT compiler to converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML. Bret Taylor, Product Manager, posted on the Google blog :

AJAX has the power to make your site more compelling and more dynamic, but AJAX development is often complicated, with much of the development time spent working around browser quirks and the fragility of AJAX components. Trust us, we know--the development of our own AJAX apps, like Google Maps and Google Calendar, caused us no small amount of AJAX-induced frustration.

That's why we're bringing you Google Web Toolkit. GWT is a new publicly available software development tool that makes creating AJAX applications much easier. With GWT, you can develop and debug your own AJAX applications in Java code using the Java development tools of your choice. When you deploy your application to production, the GWT compiler simply translates your Java application to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.

The development cycle with GWT :

1. Use your favorite Java IDE to write and debug an application in the Java language, using as many (or as few) GWT libraries as you find useful.
2. Use GWT's Java-to-JavaScript compiler to distill your application into a set of JavaScript and HTML files that you can serve with any web server.
3. Confirm that your application works in each browser that you want to support, which usually takes no additional work.

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