Google Web Toolkit

Posted on May 16, 2006 No Comments

Google Small Logo Picked this one up off of Google’s Blog: Making AJAX Development Easier. Last week I mentioned some of Yahoo!’s efforts in the development tools arena, this week we get Google’s flavor with the Google Web Toolkit.

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is 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. Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatabilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript’s lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile.

Sounds interesting enough. I headed to the download page and saw this message:

The Google Web Toolkit (GWT) SDK has everything you need to write web applications using GWT, including the GWT compiler, hosted web browser, class libraries, and a number of sample projects to get you started.

Um, compiler? Hoo boy, what is this thing? Apparently not just another javascript library, eh? Looks like spending some time at “Getting Started” will be in order if I actually dive into this.

Tags: ajax, google, javascript, programming