I just downloaded the Google Web Toolkit which was announced at Java One this week to have a look at it (See this Java Posse Podcast for an interview with one of the lead developers). My first impression on reading the documentation was that the documentation was very basic and that there is a long way to go to understanding this technology. I have to say that the kitchen sink demo didn’t immediately fill me with excitement at the cool possibilities of the technology (like Open Rico did when I first saw it) but on the other hand I can see that there is some depth here, I might just have to dig a bit to find it.
The basic idea is that you can write code in Java and then have that code compiled into Javascript that will run on any browser, avoiding the issues of dealing with different browser quirks and, hopefully, making it easy for Java programmers to get into the world of AJAX (something that definitely appeals to me). Having the code written in Java comes with one advantage: you can use Java debugging tools to debug your page before you compile it. The toolkit comes with a couple of scripts that generate a sample application shell complete with a “Hello World” button and corresponding Eclipse project (is Google favoring Eclipse over NetBeans?). The code on first impressions looks like fairly standard swing component and listener code, albeit with different method names.
According to the podcast mentioned above you can hook in other javascript libraries to this code which might mean that Open Rico could be an option for controls. The other thing you can do is embed these applications in existing pages which opens up the possibility of integrating the Google Web Toolkit with Grails. Grails is very nice, the more I look at it the better it gets and hooking up a nice client side AJAX toolkit to it would be fabulous.
If you are thinking of doing some web development in the near future then the Google Web Toolkit is worth a look.
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