Evolutionary Goo

Google has announced today that their Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is now full open source under the Apache 2.0 license. This is very good news that I believe will lead to a wider adoption of the technology.

Last Friday, ThinWire announced that its project had become fully open source under the LGPL license. With both of these competing frameworks now 100% open source, we should really start to see a lot of innovation in Ajax based Java Web frameworks. From my perspective I don’t see Ajax being adopted in the enterprise on a large scale. It seems like a lot of places are playing around an Ajax control here and there while sticking to page based applications. However, we could be at the beginning of an adoption curve that will eventually show Ajax based applications being very popular within the enterprise. The recent news from GWT and ThinWire will only accelerate that.

I also found an interesting article on the ThinWire Web site comparing ThinWire to GWT. Obviously, it is written to shine a positive light on ThinWire. Nonetheless, it is a good article and helps to identify issues that need to be looked at in regards to Ajax applications.

I’ve been following a very interesting Java Web framework, named ThinWire. It claims to be a framework that allows you to build highly interactive, rich user Web interfaces by writing only Java code (no HTML, JavaScript or CSS). Their tag line is “ThinWire… Beyond Ajax”. Up until today the open source license for this software was under the restrictive GPL, so I never took the next step to actually working with the framework. However, ThinWire just announced today that they have switched the license to the much friendlier LGPL. I am now VERY interested in this framework.

There are so many Java Web frameworks available today, that it is not very often that I see a new one that excites me. ThinWire is probably not the answer for all Web applications, but for business applications, this framework could change everything. Imagine only having to debug Java code. Less experienced developers only needing to be strong in Java. Not having to worry about cross-browser compatibilities. AJAX capability across the board. Security built with AJAX in mind. Whew… the productivity gains could be enormous.

With the change in licensing, I’m now going to take the next step and build a sample application in ThinWire. Stay tuned…

Of all the Java Web frameworks out there today, the new Google Web Toolkit (GWT) interests me the most. Basically, you write a AJAX Web front-end using Java, and GWT generates all of JavaScript and HTML. Very cool.
Google Web Toolkit