the bloggard

Google Web Toolkit (GWT), now in it’s second major release, has been around since 2006 (if not before) and I remember that it caused quite a commotion at the time, as it espoused the ability to create JavaScript based AJAX applications while programming in pure Java.

I was pretty interested in checking it out at the time but had little time on my hands and the proliferation of AJAX into the projects I was working on was pretty minimal in that perhaps one or two areas of the application leveraged the advantages of AJAX but it was far from being adopted application wide as the de facto client / server interaction model. In addition, many of the enterprise products I was dealing would have traditionally been slower in providing first class integration of newer technologies as a core product feature but were rather tacked on to fulfill customer requirements and sales & marketing demands.

I’ve had a little bit more flexibility in recent times in technology selection for new product development and have had the opportunity to use GWT and some additional libraries providing extended support for GWT and wanted to provide my insights in this blog entry and relate how what started as an evaluation of GWT ended in adoption of jQuery … (more…)