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Google`s Innovative Yet Limited Ajax Environment: GWT
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05/21/2006, By Dion Hinchcliffe
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Google's recent foray into delivering an Ajaxified Web application stack, the Google Web Toolkit, says much about Google's pragmatic method of delivering innovation to the market. I for one, would heartily recommend it for certain applications, while actively advising against it for others. One major issue is that Google makes a lot of assumptions in GWT that are non-starters for certain uses. Though making dramatic assumptions isn't a lot different than what Ruby on Rails does to make Web app development easy, the assumptions are different in interesting ways. Also note that Google does not provide a complete application stack with GWT; it only goes a little bit into the server, past the serialization boundary, which actually leaves the developer free to use the server-side frameworks and libraries of their choice, as long as their Java compatible. This is part of the pragmatism I was talking about and it turns out GWT is only high concept in a couple of places.
One of the reasons I track Ruby on Rails so closely is that it's an almost perfect match for the Web 2.0 way of building software: radical simplicity, support for almost instant turnaround of fixes and new features, automatic support for a public API so that applications are turned into platforms on their very own, and incorporation of well-recognized open source Ajax libraries, etc.. Note that GWT isn't even open source, though it is available today for commercial and non-commercial uses. As we shall see, GWT just does not seem as Web 2.0 friendly, and seems built for more traditional pure-play software as a service (Saas).
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