Rocket Surgery

I was messing with the Google Web Toolkit yesterday. My friend Jeff is a big fan of it, and he is actually using it for a Navy system that I once worked on. He’s gotten a couple of his coworkers on the bandwagon, so I started messing with it.

If you don’t know, GWT is a tool for creating AJAX applications. You write code in Java, and the GWT compiler translates it into Javascript instead of byte code. Separating the client side from the server side is built in, and they have done things to simplify RPC calls back to the server from the client.

First thing I liked is that the installation is dead easy. Download a zip file, explode it somewhere, and to make things simple, add it to your execution path. There is nice eclipse integration too. Adding and removing widgets (UI elements) from the page was also dead easy, and hooking up listeners to react when things are messed with was a breeze.

A few things still trouble me, though. The support for doing an automated or continuous integration build is not there. You kinda have to hack the GWT compiler shell scripts to find the classes to run, and use a <java> task in Ant to do the same thing. Another problem is that you are required to use JDK 1.4.2 compatible code - no generics, annotations, extended for syntax, etc. Finally, there are some restrictions related to reflection. Doing a simple “instanceof” can be problematic. Using a long can be a problem too since Javascript has no 64-bit integral type.

I’m certain that successive iterations of the toolkit will either solve or present reasonable workarounds for these problems. But for now, WOW, what it can do.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 8th, 2007 at 11:01 pm and is filed under Software development, Web tools.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.