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Google Releases AJAX Framework

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wed May 17, 2006 08:36 AM
from the well-isn't-that-special dept.
Businesses Google The Internet
maquina writes "Google released a new AJAX framework based on Java. From Google's mouth: "Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don't speak browser quirks as a second language." This impressive framework promises to make AJAX available to the masses and is one more step towards Google becoming the de facto Internet platform provider."
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Google Releases AJAX Framework 25 Comments More /

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  • Google: (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Trigun (685027) <<evil> <at> <evilempire.ath.cx>> on Wednesday May 17 2006, @08:38AM (#15349862) Homepage
    Your source of, vangaurd of and now creator of all your information.

  • I, for one... (Score:5, Funny)

    by ABoerma (941672) on Wednesday May 17 2006, @08:50AM (#15349924)
    ...welcome our new buzzword-compliant overlords. MFG, all I read these days is Google, Java and/or AJAX.

    • Re:I, for one... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Ingolfke (515826) on Wednesday May 17 2006, @08:59AM (#15349990) Journal
      Yeah, lets bring back the good ole' days when Linx, Internet, world wide web, or microcomputer were the buzzwords of the day.

      You people are look old farts complaining about the kids and their music today. Sure there are buzzwords and there is hype, but there always is, so just deal with it.

  • The license is restrictive.. mods prohibited (Score:5, Informative)

    by HighOrbit (631451) * on Wednesday May 17 2006, @08:58AM (#15349979)
    Prohibited Actions

    Except for distributions for internal business and/or personal use to your employees or contractors in compliance with these Terms and Conditions, you may not distribute Google Web Toolkit Development Tools or any services or software associated with or derived from them, or modify, copy, license, or create derivative works from Google Web Toolkit Development Tools, unless you obtain Google's written permission in advance. If you wish to do any of the above, please contact us by emailing apis@google.com. You may not use the Google Web Toolkit Development Tools to develop or distribute products that violate the law or legal rights of third parties.

    No, I'm not looking a gift horse in the mouth and why does this matter? Because I happen to prefer PHP for web development (just a personal preference). It would be nice to be able to move the JavaScript components off from the Java framework into a PHP based framework. Well, apparantly you can't do that without special permission.

    BTW, the Yahoo UI Library [yahoo.com] is BSD licensed.

    • Re:The license is restrictive.. mods prohibited (Score:5, Informative)

      by Dorktrix (148287) on Wednesday May 17 2006, @11:30AM (#15351222) Homepage
      Have your attorney review the terms -- I think you are misunderstanding them. You may not redistribute GWT itself (the actual zip files containing the GWT compiler, among other things), but you own all output from the tools. We even released the source code to the class libraries under the Apache 2.0 open source license.

      GWT is available for commercial, non-commercial, and enterprise use with almost no strings attached. Please review the complete terms for details:

      http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/terms.html [google.com]

      Bret Taylor
      Product Manager, Google Web Toolkit

  • Not included and YUI comparisons... (Score:5, Informative)

    by mgkimsal2 (200677) on Wednesday May 17 2006, @09:03AM (#15350011) Homepage
    The oft-copied 'google suggest' dropdown stuff. It's not something demoed in the 'kitchensink' app they provide at http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/documentation/ex amples/kitchensink/ [google.com].

    I agree with someone else that the Yahoo UI (yui) toolkit seems to get ignored a bit, but I think this plays to a different crowd.

    1) This is a java-based thing only it seems. People writing .net can use atlas for most of these features, people using Ruby or other scripting langauges probably have bindings to scriptaculous and other libraries to handle most of this. There were/are probably Java bindings already for scriptaculous, but this makes it easier for java people already used to swing/awt stuff.

    2) The YUI stuff was more javascript oriented, and, from my experience, difficult to use in some settings. I had a hard time getting the slider stuff to work as needed based solely on their code and one example page, for example. Perhaps that makes me not as l33t as some others who can debug others' javascript in their sleep - I dunno. I do know that if Google makes this easy for people to adopt, it'll take off. Partially because there's a lot of google love amongst early-adopters in the tech community, and partially because making things easy is just a good way to attract people. :)

    3) With the YUI stuff, Yahoo was/is seeming to cater to the scripting crowd more (witness the native serialized PHP responses you can get back). If google is going after the "I write Java apps" crowd, they may be able to bring in a new set of people to web-app development who before now were not in the web space.

    I interviewed one of the Yahoo engineers who worked on the YUI widgets release at my podcast - http://webdevradio.com [webdevradio.com] - you can get some more perspective on what Yahoo was/is doing and trying to achieve with that move.

    Just some random thoughts...

  • echo framework anyone? (Score:5, Informative)

    by MartinG (52587) on Wednesday May 17 2006, @10:01AM (#15350396) Homepage Journal
    Coding your UI in java and having it translated into javascript and html without having to worry about cross browser compatibility?

    Sounds familiar. It's rather like the echo framework [nextapp.com]

    The big differences I see are:

    1) Google toolkit advantages:
    - No load on the server to render the UI. All ui code runs on the browser, so this may help server scalability.

    2) Echo advantages:
    - Fully open source.
    - Richer set of ui components (IMO - see the demo at http://demo.nextapp.com/Demo/app [nextapp.com] )

  • If you like Java... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by drew (2081) on Wednesday May 17 2006, @10:40AM (#15350729) Homepage
    I suppose that's nice if you actually like programming in Java.

    I'll stick to rolling my own, thanks. I suspect I wouldn't be able to use a tool like this for more than a half hour without finding something I want to do that the toolkit doesn't support. What then? Can you edit the JavaScript output by hand or is it totally obfuscated?

    • Re:Once again, Yahoo! is overlooked (Score:5, Insightful)

      by segfault_0 (181690) on Wednesday May 17 2006, @08:50AM (#15349922)
      That appears to be precanned Javascript,etc. that alot of people have done before. This is Java programming and debugging straight to 100% browser compatible HTML and Javascript. The only group larger than the google fanboy club is the google is smarter than me and i hate them club.

    • Yeah, right.. (Score:5, Informative)

      by schon (31600) on Wednesday May 17 2006, @08:53AM (#15349944) Homepage
      Yahoo has already done this

      No, they haven't - at least not unless you have some other information you're not sharing.

      From the Google site:
      You write your front end in the Java programming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.

      From the Yahoo link you provided:
      To use a specific component from the YUI Library, include the path to that library in a <script> tag within your web page.

      So, how is this the same thing?
    • Nope, there's a big difference between these libraries.

      The Y! framework still requires you to write HTML and Javascript - they just make implementing DHTML effects + AJAX less painful.

      The Google framework removes the base need for HTML and Javascript authoring from the application development process entirely. Obviously you'll want to make the app look nice and need custom styling but in order to actually develop the functionality, zero HTML is needed.

      As a consequence you can use the Yahoo stuff with any backend implementation language (PHP, Java, whatever) while the Google framework is limited to strictly Java. I don't mind though. :)

    • Re:Once again, Yahoo! is overlooked (Score:5, Informative)

      by Z0mb1eman (629653) on Wednesday May 17 2006, @08:59AM (#15349985) Homepage
      Ohhh? Was it overlooked? [slashdot.org]

      To be fair, Yahoo's is just a collection of controls and widgets to be included in a project indvidually - which has been offered by many other sites for quite a while now - while Google's promises to be a framework that takes the headache out of front-end AJAX development. Of course, in my experience "automatically generates code" and "takes the headache out of" are eventually incompatible down the line, but what do I know.

      I haven't played with either yet, but they sound like two different beasts to me. The most interesting part of this to me would be to see how Google writes their web code.

    • Re:The best feature of this toolkit (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Ingolfke (515826) on Wednesday May 17 2006, @08:56AM (#15349961) Journal
      Just because the AJAX code is not hand coded doesn't mean Google is moving in a new direction. In fact they're moving forward more agressively in the same direction, and are just releasing tools to help everyone go the same way (especially the Google way).

    • Re:The best feature of this toolkit (Score:5, Informative)

      by seizer (16950) on Wednesday May 17 2006, @08:57AM (#15349968) Homepage
      It's not quite a "brand new direction" - Microsoft's Atlas product has been offering something along these lines for a while now (albeit still as a beta). You lay out controls visually in Visual Studio (or Express), and control them programmatically from .NET. It takes care of rendering them down to HTML + Javascript, and it's pretty much cross platform friendly.

    • Re:The best feature of this toolkit (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 17 2006, @08:57AM (#15349970)
      I personally find the way it handles remote prodecure calls to the server [google.com] the most interesting. Just define a serializable java class, you say? And GWT handles the rest, you say? Sign me up!

      This is sexy stuff, people. :-)

    • The worst feature of this toolkit... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Bogtha (906264) on Wednesday May 17 2006, @08:57AM (#15349973)

      ...is that it's a closed-source, binary-only executable. Download page [google.com]:

      The GWT Java-to-JavaScript compiler and hosted web browser are shipped binary-only and subject to the license below.

    • Another downside... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Bogtha (906264) on Wednesday May 17 2006, @09:00AM (#15349995)

      ...is that it phones home [google.com] to Google.

      When you use the Google Web Toolkit's hosted web browser, the application sends a request back to Google's servers to check to see if you are using the most recent version of the product. As a part of this request, Google will log usage data including a timestamp of the date and time you downloaded the Google Web Toolkit and the IP address for your computer. We won't log cookies or personal information about you, and we will use any data we log only in the aggregate to operate and improve the Google Web Toolkit and other Google Services. Please see the Google Privacy Policy for more information.

      • Re:Another downside... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by avdp (22065) * on Wednesday May 17 2006, @09:13AM (#15350065)
        As opposed to Firefox (and right about every modern application I've used), which doesn't? It's just checking if there is an update to download. And only in the "hosted web browser" which you don't even need to use. Jeez. Paranoid.

    • Re:The best feature of this toolkit (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 17 2006, @09:03AM (#15350007)
      "I think Google is mostly responsible for launching the AJAX trend"
       
      Er, nope. Hard as it is to believe, Microsoft were there first with the awesome Outlook Web Access which mimics Outlook, on a web page really, really well. This used their XMLHTTP ActiveX object which is also used extensively in Windows Update.
       
      The rest happened from there really. Google is probably the best known current implementer of AJAX, but good as they are I certainly wouldn't say they launched it... and I certainly wish world + dog would stop releasing AJAX frameworks!

      • Nope - OWA was closed. (Score:5, Informative)

        by mgkimsal2 (200677) on Wednesday May 17 2006, @09:06AM (#15350026) Homepage
        Sorry, but I have to give it to someone other than Microsoft. While they did essentially invent the tech behind Ajax, the only major project they used it on was basically something that was closed. I don't mean source, but not open to the public. You only saw it if you had an organization using Outlook/Exchange in the first place, which still excluded a huge majority of people using the web. Had they ported hotmail to the OWA interface, that would have been a major revolution far greater than google maps or anything else. But they didn't.

      • Re:The best feature of this toolkit (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Bogtha (906264) on Wednesday May 17 2006, @09:15AM (#15350083)

        Microsoft might have provided the first XMLHttpRequest implementation and used it first, but it was Google that made it popular. Before Google Suggest (and later GMail) caught everybody's attention, it languished relatively unknown to most developers for years. Now you can't get away from it.

        Sure, browser compatibility played a large part too, but even after Mozilla implemented XMLHttpRequest, I didn't see many people talking about it until Google started using it. So Microsoft might have launched XMLHttpRequest, but it was Google that launched the trend, which is what xbrownx said.

    • Re:The best feature of this toolkit (Score:5, Informative)

      by badfish99 (826052) on Wednesday May 17 2006, @09:20AM (#15350116)
      Here's a much better implementation of the same idea that's been available for some time now: http://zk1.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

      It's not "beta" like this half-baked "me-too" from google, and it's open-source.Also commercial support is available it you want to pay for it.

      • Re:Yawn (Score:5, Funny)

        by volsung (378) <stan@mtrr.org> on Wednesday May 17 2006, @09:05AM (#15350022)
        To bring balance to the Force. For every crazed, frothing pusher of tech hype, there must be a sullen, ennui-laden detractor who either:
        • is bored by the new tech, and likes to proclaim so whenever possible.
        • did the same thing 5 years ago.
        • or thinks the technology is useless.

        This is required by the Central Hype-Limit Theorem:

        As the size of the sample increases, the average opinion of the group approaches the actual utility of the product in question.

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