John

Ever since the web has ventured into its newest phase known as Web 2.0, one of the attributes web developers have started to focus on is the interface in which users interact. Gone are the days of static web pages built in html, table based layouts, and infamous page refresh. Developers have made every attempt to drift away from the old look and feel and have started to concentrate on the “sexiness” by making the user interfaces more rich and application-like. This is still primarily done in JavaScript (though in can be done in Flash and Mozilla Prism/XUL), and if you are not aware of all the browsers idiosyncrasies when rendering JavaScript, the barrier to entry can be fairly high.

Several days ago when googleing “widgets” I came across a JavaScript library (ExtJS) which allows users to easily make rich interfaces. However, after looking around, I saw their library came in two flavors: ExtJS and ExtJS GWT (the latter being a plugin for the Google Web Toolkit). Up to this point, I have only heard of GWT. After looking through the documentation on the ExtJS website I saw a vast difference between the source code examples. The ExtJS code looked like archaic JavaScript while the source code for the ExtJS GWT examples looked more elegant and very similar to Java.

After looking into the GWT, it turns out that you are able to create interfaces using Java (a language more oriented toward GUI’s) then compile that interface into JavaScript code using the compiler provided by the GWT.