Although Ikayzo does web development, I've personally been doing mostly desktop development for the past five years. I've worked with Swing, SWT, WinForms and WPF. Every time I was forced to work on web projects I cringed because the UI piece was so much uglier and less evolved than any of the aforementioned desktop frameworks. Recently
Pat and I started work on a new business that requires web programming and we settled on GWT for the UI (with a Flex version to follow soon.) I briefly fiddled with the first release of GWT which was interesting but limited. For the past three days I've been diving in with GWT 1.5 and
GWT-EXT and I have to say, this toolkit is absolutely fantastic. I've fallen in love with web programming again. If you haven't heard of GWT, you can read all about it on the
GWT Google Code page. The first paragraph really says it all - "Google Web Toolkit (GWT) makes it easier to write high-performance AJAX applications. You write your front end in the Java programming language and GWT compiles your source into highly optimized JavaScript. Writing web apps today is a tedious and error-prone process. You spend 90% of your time working around browser quirks, and JavaScript's lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile. It doesn't have to be that way." The Java to Javascript compiler is an impressive feat of engineering. I'll probably go into this in a separate post. The fact that I can use the same language for all tiers of the application is a big win. The ease of use coupled with the quality of the components, GWT-EXT in particular, really puts this framework on a different level. The GWT-EXT components are fast, responsive and feature rich. Many components such as the tree and table have built in drag and drop capabilities with translucent drag images, visual feedback for drop targets, etc. If you are starting a new web project, I highly recommend you give GWT a try. Flex and GWT have finally made web programming as elegant and easy as desktop programming.
Ikayzo - Design • Build • Localize | Web • Desktop • Mobile
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