We’ve been looking around for a while at which of our current projects could benefit most from adding some AJAX pieces like sorting, dynamic sub-refreshes, quick menus, etc. The jury’s still out, since we don’t want to do it “just to do it”, but now I know what tool I want to use: the just-released Google Web Toolkit.
The toolkit basically lets you write and debug(!!) your AJAX application using your favorite Java IDE (they provide nice hooks for Eclipse). While developing you can test it in an integrated “browser” in the JVM — access to debugger — or in a standalone Javascript/HTML web browser. Also important, they integrate support for manipulating the back/forward button stacks so those finally can do the right thing in your AJAX page. Sweet.
Lots more reading and investigating to do on my part, but this is huge. I’ve had some exposure to Google Maps API and been impressed with the functionality, and it seemed obvious that something like this was going to follow. It’s different than I thought (Java) but makes sense. They claim comparable code sizes and speed compared to hand-written AJAX, but the development / debug cycle will be so much quicker it makes some performance hit worthwhile.
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