Published on 2006-05-17 08:25:10
I find the idea of a GWT compiler very interesting since for Java developers the development will be much more easy compared to Javascript development which is more difficult and require more time to finalize your application. Wondering if the release of GWT is an answer to the YUI or a way that google is choosing to let more users try their development tools and give feedback to make it better. I'm sure that the experience of Yahoo! with their proprietary Yscript wasn't good, things that makes Yahoo! look for alternative scripting language such PHP, and make the decision of working with open source more easy to take. In the other side Google was very open since its beginning but open sourcing their projects in this way wasn't in their strategic plans, since most of the project released are related to APIs based on the different google services.
Also we know that Google is one of the first members announced in the Open AJAX project, so maybe this motivated the release of a GWT, in addition that Google have a great experience with RIA in their products such Google reader, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Calendar ... etc.
Google Web Toolkit have many interesting features :
* Dynamic, reusable UI components : the widget-based architecture provide a great flexibility to create new components, merge and share.
* Really simple RPC : To communicate from your web application to your web server, you just need to define serializable Java classes for your request and response. In production, GWT automatically serializes the request and deserializes the response from the server. GWT's RPC mechanism can even handle polymorphic class hierarchies, and you can throw exceptions across the wire.
* Browser history management : a focus on usability to not break the back button, GWT provide this possibility by easily adding state to the browser's back button history.
* Real debugging : In production, your code is compiled to JavaScript, but at development time it runs in the Java virtual machine. That means when your code performs an action like handling a mouse event, you get full-featured Java debugging, with exceptions and the advanced debugging features of IDEs like Eclipse.
* Browser compatible : GWT applications automatically support IE, Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, and Opera with no browser detection or special-casing within your code in most cases.
* Interoperability and fine-grained control :If GWT's class library doesn't meet your needs, you can mix handwritten JavaScript in your Java source code using our JavaScript Native Interface (JSNI).
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