via ajaxian:

Google has released Google Web Toolkit (GWT), a code generation framework that lets you code Ajax apps in pure Java. It’s not unlike Echo2, the open-source framework from NextApp. A compiler performs the Java-to-Javascript translation.

• Use your favorite Java IDE to write and debug an application in the Java language, using as many (or as few) GWT libraries as you find useful.
• 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.
• Confirm that your application works in each browser that you want to support, which usually takes no additional work.

GWT offers tools for remoting as well as a range of widgets: hierachical trees, tab bars, menu bars, and modal dialog boxes. There’s no mention of using these widgets standalone, but hopefully they can be used as pure Javascript widgets in much the same way as Scriptaculous can be used without Rails.

A widget like tree has methods to manipulate the structure (e.g. addItem()) and event handlers (e.g. addFocusListener).

A developer friend of mine recently turned me on to haXe (pronounced “HAX-ee”, a sort of generic programming language that gets compiled into java, php, active script (flash), javascript, etc. This means you write all your code in one language (haXe) and then compile it to whatever application language you want. If it spits out javascript, for example, it delints it (no white spaces or comments) and renames all the name spaces to short (abstract) variable names to create the smallest file possible. Because you’re authoring everything in haXe, the compiler runs like any other compiler, helping to ensure your code will execute. I’m not sure how it works if you want to use 3rd party libraries (I’m thinking about things like Scriptaculous), but it sounds very, very promising. I’d love to see some more qualified folks than myself evaluate it. Read the rest of this entry »

Sorry about the non-annotated linkdump. Aaron’s always after me to post stuff here instead of emailing him links to new things I find, but I just don’t have time to describe all these sites. At least I categorized them… Read the rest of this entry »

Nifty ajax to java interface for those of you unaware of it:

http://getahead.ltd.uk/dwr/

“DWR reduces development time and the likelihood of errors by providing commonly used functions and removing almost all of the repetitive code normally associated with highly interactive web sites.”