Google Web Toolkit for AJAX development

Bret Taylor, Google Product Manager wrote that AJAX has the power to make your site more compelling and more dynamic, but AJAX development is often complicated, with much of the development time spent working around browser quirks and the fragility of AJAX components.

So Google released the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) , 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. Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatabilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript's lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile.

GWT lets you avoid many of these headaches while offering your users the same dynamic, standards-compliant experience. You write your front end in the Java programming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.

Download Google Web Toolkit (GWT)

Google Web Toolkit Features>

• Dynamic, reusable UI components
  Create a Widget by compositing other Widgets. Lay out Widgets automatically in Panels. Send your Widget to other developers in a JAR file.
• Really simple RPC
  To communicate from your web application to your web server, you just need to define serializable Java classes for your request and response. In production, GWT automatically serializes the request and deserializes the response from the server. GWT's RPC mechanism can even handle polymorphic class hierarchies, and you can throw exceptions across the wire.
• Browser history management
  No, AJAX applications don't need to break the browser's back button. GWT lets you make your site more usable by easily adding state to the browser's back button history.
• Real debugging
  In production, your code is compiled to JavaScript, but at development time it runs in the Java virtual machine. That means when your code performs an action like handling a mouse event, you get full-featured Java debugging, with exceptions and the advanced debugging features of IDEs like Eclipse.
• Browser compatible
  Your GWT applications automatically support IE, Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, and Opera with no browser detection or special-casing within your code in most cases.
• Interoperability and fine-grained control
  If GWT's class library doesn't meet your needs, you can mix handwritten JavaScript in your Java source code using our JavaScript Native Interface (JSNI).