Google Web Toolkit 1.2 Uses WebKit
Posted by Adam Roben on Saturday, November 18th, 2006 at 1:59 amGoogle has just released version 1.2 of the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) with full Mac OS X support provided by WebKit. GWT allows web developers to create shiny AJAX web applications entirely in Java, which GWT compiles to JavaScript. While Mac users were able to use the GWT compiler in previous versions, they couldn’t use GWT’s hosted browser to debug their web apps. WebKit has made it possible for Google to bring these development tools to the Mac, and, as a surprise Mac-only bonus, web developers using GWT get to use the Web Inspector, too!
November 18th, 2006 at 9:39 am
Nice
November 20th, 2006 at 7:32 am
It’s always struck me as bizarre that Google think this is a good idea. If you want to help people to write JavaScript applications, surely it would be rather more useful if they were written in, oh, I don’t know… JavaScript?
November 21st, 2006 at 3:54 pm
Google realizes that the situation we are in with web development right now is similar to the situation that early developers faced when having to port applications between processors - you have to contend with each (virtual) machine’s idiosyncracies, levels of support, bugs, etc. That’s why higher level languages were invented - to abstract those niggling details and way and let developers be more productive.
And Google’s not alone. Sun, Adobe, Dojo, OpenLaszlo and even Microsoft (Atlas) all realize that we need to “move up the stack” in web development to get away from all this browser compatibility ridiculousness.