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.
Read the rest of this entry »