Google Web Toolkit: Web Applications Just Got Harder
Better applications? maybe. But easier? I don't think so. It is a good thing? Absolutely.
Oh the buzz. Oh the excitement. Oh the AJaX Gods has released their secret sauce with an Apache license.
Google Web Toolkit allows one to develop AJaX web applications entirely in Java, and deploy as HTML/JavaScript.
This confirms what I said 354 days ago:
Questioning AJAX: In essence, you are developing a web application in name only. The expectations/experience impedance will be the down fall of AJAX.
From a development perspective, especially for new projects where I have a choice between Web vs. Swing (or some other GUI technology) the line needs to be drawn differently: Instead of dividing them up like this
- Web apps, including traditional (request/response) and AJAX
- GUI apps
I would divide them differently now
- Request/response web apps
- Rich apps, including AJAX web apps and GUI apps
Now that developing an AJaX application is really the same thing as developing a GUI application, I want to draw your attention to what Eric Burke said 776 days ago:
GUI Programming is Hard: Let me qualify what I said in the first paragraph. Creating a bad GUI is really, really easy. Creating a "good" GUI is really, really hard.
I'm not saying Google Web Toolkit is a bad thing. To the contrary, it's a very good thing. It means our ten year delusion that web page scripting could win over true GUI development like Windows, Swing, SWT, Cocoa, or even Motif, for that matter, is coming to an end. Web programming has just become the usage of another Toolkit, the GWT.
BTW, have you tried to google for "Google Web Toolkit" yesterday and early today? The hits are all irrelevant. I have to go to Yahoo!Search to find it. No, I'm not making this up. I was trying to find the home page link for this blog entry, and I have to use my CustomizeGoogle Firefox extension to try all the other search engines.
Ironic, isn't it.