Google Web 'kit



Google released a tool kit to create light weight web applications called Google Web Toolkit.
You can find it at http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/

Basically the GWT takes Java code and does a 1:1 translation to JavaScript with a kind fo cross-compiler. It is optimized and shrank and all that good stuff. This is a pretty cool idea to start with, however, when you add in their mock browser development system, and their hooks into the native browser on Win and Lin (sorry Mac), you get to step through and debug your *Java* code before it gets atomagically turned into the JavaScript.

They include a JavaBean -> JavaScript serialization system, a completely runtime bound RPC system that calls back into a standard servlet, extended with your business method, The “JavaScript Native Interface”, which means basically you put additional direct JavaScript you want executed in a comment inside your “Will become JavaScript” classes and it gets inserted directly.

As one person said, this was the presentation that made the show. it is both a technical tour de force and an amazingly useful tool at the same time. I will try and come back and cover this a little more later, and also get my JavaOne Day One roundup posted.