Google Gifts

Google continues to spew out wonderful software innovations beyond just search -- all at no charge. Google Earth provides a 3D interface to the planet. Google's SketchUp is a simple tool for quickly and easily creating, viewing and modifying 3D models of houses, sheds, decks, home additions, woodworking projects, etc. Google Calendar is a terrific tool for organizing schedules. Google Blogger is the software I use for creating and publishing the ITscout Blog. Google Gmail and Groups provide cool email and group discussion capabilities, respectively. For a complete list of Google's set of awesome free tools, see More Google products.

The latest Google software marvel is the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), a Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications easy. With GWT, you can develop and debug AJAX applications in the Java language using the Java development tools of your choice. When you deploy your application to production, the GWT compiler translates your Java application to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.

Google Web Toolkit ships with a Java-to-JavaScript compiler and a special web browser that helps you debug your GWT applications.

Here's the GWT development cycle:

1. Use your favorite Java IDE (like Eclipse) to write and debug an application in the Java language, using as many (or as few) GWT libraries as you find useful. You can use GWT's set of UI components (called Widgets) to construct the UI elements that make up your AJAX application. Like traditional UI frameworks, Widgets are combined in Panels that determine the layout of the widgets contained within them. GWT supports a variety of built-in Widgets that are useful for AJAX applications, including hierachical trees, tab bars, menu bars, and modal dialog boxes. GWT also has built-in support for remote procedure calls and other more sophisticated web application features.


2. Use GWT's Java-to-JavaScript compiler to distill your application into a set of JavaScript and HTML files that you can serve with any web server. Your applications run as pure JavaScript and HTML, compiled from your original Java source code with the GWT Java-to-JavaScript compiler. When you deploy your GWT applications to production, you deploy this JavaScript and HTML to your web servers.


3. Confirm that your application works in each browser that you want to support, which usually takes no additional work.

AJAX is what makes Google Maps so cool. AJAX is what enables Google Maps to be dynamic, interactive, and draggable with no clicking and waiting for graphics to reload each time you want to view the adjacent parts of a map.

In my humble opinion (IMHO), Google Web Toolkit is a gift from the Gods. Thank you Google.