Google Web Toolkit

An article by benrobb    No Comments

I realize that I’m behind the times, but I finally got around to downloading the Google Web Toolkit last night and began to play around with it. From what I’ve seen it’s pretty neat. You simply write Java code, and the Google Web Toolkit will translate it into browser compatible JavaScript. They’ve created a group of components (buttons, tables, tabs, checkboxes, radio buttons, etc.) that are built to handle browser compatibility issues, thus taking the headache out of the browser issues that are the bane of every web developer’s existence.

Strengths

• Cross-platform – in every sense of the word, you can develop apps on any platform, view them natively on any platform. As mentioned above, it creates browser compatible javascript.
• Easy to pickup – if you know Java, you can pick it up and start building pretty quickly. There juse isn’t a real steep learning curve.
• Eclipse support – if you’ve ever developed in Java, you know that Eclipse is the platform of choice (also the platform of choice for many other languages). The project creator that comes with the GWT allows you to easily create Eclipse projects and import them into Eclipse.
• Price – free

Weaknesses

• Java – If you don’t know Java, this is not the development platform for you. The correlation is that if you’re not a Java shop, this is not for you.

Competitors

• Adobe Labs Spry framework for Ajax
• Yahoo! Developer Network