Published on 2007-03-04 18:56:22
Well those are two small usages compared to the core, revenue generating Google AJAX applications suite. It's clear that Google has PhD engineers galore who can solve algorithms. Every young engineer believes all problems are basically engineering problems; the difference is in their level of complexity. Some are trivial and some challenging, but all can be solved. So does Google have only young engineers or do they also have seasoned software architects? Do they have compiler writers and IDE designers? Have you noticed that they need Eclipse, GWT Designer (derived from WindowBuilder Pro), and even XML11, an interesting project very similar to GWT, to learn how to make GWT useful to build their own GWT created AJAX applications.
When asked about GWT and open source, Fuad Ta'eed, Morfik Pioneers' Program manager said "Google seems to have turned to the extremely capable and talented open source community in order to try to take GWT to a level where Google might be able to use it gainfully."
Gmail, for example, is one monolithic JavaScript spaghetti code, how could you bring it to GWT easily? Would Google have to rewrite it from scratch using GWT? What about everything else? There is that whole list of Google applications we mentioned before without considering the upcoming Google applications. It's like when you have a factory to builds cars. Even if the factory is streamlined for efficiency but the cars are built manually, it will be slow. One needs robots to be able to bring speed, consistency and efficiency. Without a genuinely working GWT robot, Google's problems are serious. Today Google has a hand-driven factory.
If all your products are based on running in the browser and the only tool at your disposal are hands - i.e. hand-coded JavaScript(s) that you have created - you will hit the glass ceiling of complexity very very fast for anything serious. For controls/components no problem at all, but for serious applications hand-coded JavaScript is a dead end. Everything you add just makes life more difficult. Not just because more moving parts introduce complexity but also because of the dead weight introduced every time you add yet one more JavaScript snippet to the ever accumulating pile of islands of JavaScript code. Today AJAX is starting to get an image of 'yet-another-component' as no real, pure AJAX application seems to have come from anyone - except maybe Morfik.
If Google does not get GWT (or something else) to work for it, it is in a production trap, it cannot respond to changes fast enough and the web is all about change. In conclusion, it's clear that GWT as it stands is not enough, so what should Google do to save the situation? Go open source and hope somebody comes to its rescue...
References :
GWT is Open-Sourced by Brady Forrest at O'Reilly Radar.
Google Web Toolkit goes 100% open source by Ed Burnette at ZDNet
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