Google Releases Web Toolkit Beta - Build AJAX apps in the Java language

[mandy]

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.

GWT lets you avoid many of these headaches while offering your users the same dynamic, standards-compliant experience. You write your front end in the Java programming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.

Google Web Toolkit Features

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      Dynamic, reusable UI components
      Create a Widget by compositing other Widgets. Lay out Widgets automatically in Panels. Send your Widget to other developers in a JAR file.
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      Really simple RPC
      To communicate from your web application to your web server, you just need to define serializable Java classes for your request and response. In production, GWT automatically serializes the request and deserializes the response from the server. GWT's RPC mechanism can even handle polymorphic class hierarchies, and you can throw exceptions across the wire.
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      Browser history management
      No, AJAX applications don't need to break the browser's back button. GWT lets you make your site more usable by easily adding state to the browser's back button history.
    *
      Real debugging
      In production, your code is compiled to JavaScript, but at development time it runs in the Java virtual machine. That means when your code performs an action like handling a mouse event, you get full-featured Java debugging, with exceptions and the advanced debugging features of IDEs like Eclipse.
    *
      Browser compatible
      Your GWT applications automatically support IE, Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, and Opera with no browser detection or special-casing within your code in most cases.
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      Interoperability and fine-grained control
      If GWT's class library doesn't meet your needs, you can mix handwritten JavaScript in your Java source code using our JavaScript Native Interface (JSNI).

Google Web Toolkit home page: http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/
download it here: http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/download.html
Product overview: http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/overview.html
Developer guide: http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/documentation/

[mandy]

There's a good article on using the new Google Web Toolkit here:

GWT is, in essence, a JavaScript generator. The interesting thing is what this JavaScript is generated from: Java. GWT takes Java code written against a special API and converts it into browser-runnable Ajax code...

Getting Started

GWT is really just an executable Java application with some hooks into Tomcat and either Mozilla or MSIE under Linux and Windows, respectively (sorry Mac users, you are out of luck for now). When you download the GWT, it comes with several sample projects, including "KitchenSink," the GWT equivalent of SwingSet. You can run the batch file in the samples/KitchenSink directory to see it run. Two things will pop up: the GWT server monitor application and browser window where you can see the application run. Executing java com.google.gwt.dev.GWTShell --help with your platform's *dev.jar and gwt-user.jar will show you the options available:...

full article: http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2006/...olkit.html