The Google Web Toolkit
By Allen Holub
July 1, 2006 —
(Page 1 of 3)
Regular readers of this column are familiar with my feelings about AJAX. I think of it as a necessary evil—the only politically (though not technically) viable way to get an interactive Web application’s rich user interface onto the browser. My main problem with AJAX is that once you get past the hype, AJAX is nothing more than a massive steaming heap of JavaScript, and I hate JavaScript. It’s a poorly designed language executing in a nonstandard environment with only the most primitive debugging support.
Most important, JavaScript is a fundamentally procedural language (the so-called object-oriented extensions are just warts). I just hate the idea of having to splice this garbage onto my well-designed object-oriented server-side application, and I hate spending the time required to get even simple things to work on all the most common browsers.
A few client-side AJAX libraries exist (Dojo, TIBCO’s GI, etc.), but if you use them, you’re still programming (and debugging) in JavaScript. The open-source libraries are typically undocumented, flaky and amateurish.
Google has gone a long way toward solving the problem by taking the make-it-look-like-a-nail approach to AJAX (an approach I normally don’t like, but it works really well here). I’m referring to the free Google Web Toolkit (GWT), available at code.google.com/webtoolkit.
The core of GWT is a compiler that translates standard Java to JavaScript.
You write the client side code entirely in Java, using a GWT widget library for the GUI. The system uses the familiar Composite design pattern (panels can contain other panels or widgets). Panels can be docked. Low-level widgets include various buttons (including check boxes, radio groups, etc.) text fields and areas (which can display HTML), hyperlinks, list boxes, a full-blown menu bar, tabbed windows, tables and trees. You can attach normal Java listeners to any of these for client-side event processing. You can easily customize look and feel.
Most of the classes in the java.lang package are also available on the client side, as are the java.util Date, Arrays, Collections and some of the basic collection classes (ArrayList, HashMap, HashSet, Stack, Vector and iterators across these classes). Other classes provide access to the DOM, cookies, browser-widow properties, and other client-side niceties.
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