Utkarsh Sinha

I’ve been experimenting with the Google Web Toolkit, or GWT (pronounced g-wet). And only after fiddling around with this toolkit did I realize why Google is so excited about web apps.

So, what exactly is GWT? It’s a set of tools that let you compile Java into JavaScript. Java is a general purpose language and is extremely robust. JavaScript, on the other hand, is rather specific to browsers, and isn’t exactly as robust.

With JavaScript, you’d feel relived that your project ended. You usually wouldn’t want to build upon it further. GWT changes this drastically. You write extremely manageable code in terms of classes, inheritance hierarchies, objects, functions, and typed variables, which gets compiled into “unmanageable” JavaScript by a compiler.

And this JavaScript is guaranteed to run exactly the same on 5 different popular browsers.

And a BIG plus about GWT is: because you’re using Java, you can use Java’s IDEs to write code and debug! Imagine auto-completion, syntax highlight, on-the-fly error messages, breakpoints. All of this for your web apps! Awesome!

With so many tools to help programmers, and amazing rendering capabilities of browsers (CSS3, HTML5, et al), you can surely expect some great web apps. And that’s what Google saw. Leading to the creation of Chrome. Which is another story!

Get the toolkit: http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/
Watch technical showcases: http://code.google.com/events/io/2009/sessions.html#gwt