Joel Spolsky has an interesting piece up over at Joel on Software comparing the development of the web with the development of computer software from mainframes to PC’s. It’s an interesting article and well worth a read. One of the points he makes is about how a new web framework is needed to iron out the differences between the browsers and remove incompatibility problems from the minds of web developers:

Somebody is going to write a compelling SDK that you can use to make powerful Ajax applications with common user interface elements that work together. And whichever SDK wins the most developer mindshare will have the same kind of competitive stronghold as Microsoft had with their Windows API.

Great idea. Except that Google has already done such a thing. It’s called Google Web Toolkit and it is available now. Sure it’s early days for GWT but it offers exactly the sorts of capabilities that Joel is talking about:

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is an open source 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 incompatibilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript’s lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile.

GWT lets you avoid many of these headaches while offering your users the same dynamic, standards-compliant experience. You write your front end in the Java programming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.

So when Joel uses Google as his example of a company that is going to be blindsided by the new web application framework:

But then, while you’re sitting on your googlechair in the googleplex sipping googleccinos and feeling smuggy smug smug smug, new versions of the browsers come out that support cached, compiled JavaScript. And suddenly NewSDK is really fast.

And while you’re not paying attention, everybody starts writing NewSDK apps, and they’re really good, and suddenly businesses ONLY want NewSDK apps, and all those old-school Plain Ajax apps look pathetic and won’t cut and paste and mash and sync and play drums nicely with one another. And Gmail becomes a legacy. The WordPerfect of Email. And you’ll tell your children how excited you were to get 2GB to store email, and they’ll laugh at you. Their nail polish has more than 2GB.

I think that he misses the point. Google isn’t going to be blindsided by the new web framework, it’s developing the new web framework. It’s GWT and it’s here now.

Update: Joel Spolsky has replied to the many people who emailed him about his post suggesting web frameworks, stating his criteria for one of them to be his “NewSDK”. The reply is in the middle of his Princeton, Philadelphia and Boston Trip Report (3rd last paragraph)