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Following my prediction in a previous blog, Google just made the tools from its recently acquired Instantiations free to all developers/testers. Besides goodwills to the developer community, this move makes GWT a serious competitor to Adobe Flex, Microsoft Silverlight for Rich Internet Applications.

You can give these tools a try while developing and testing Web applications, or Java GUI applications:  Read more... (198 words, estimated 48 secs reading time)

• GWT Designer
  “a powerful set of Eclipse-based development tools that enables Java developers to quickly create Ajax web applications using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT).”

I attended Eclipse Day at Google headquarter today. It’s a great event packed with several great talks.

Mobile application is for sure a hot topic these days. There were several talks on mobile application development like Android Tools for Eclipse by Xavier Ducrohet from Google, Eclipse Sequoyah for Android App Developers by Eric Cloninger from Motorola, Tools for Mobile Web by Paul Beusterien from Symbian Foundation, and EMF for GWT by Ed Merks from Cloudsmith.

While sitting in the talk on Instantiations Eclipse Tools, I learned that Google bought the company 3 weeks ago. I expect Google will soon make WindowsBuilder, a famous WYSIWYG GUI authoring tool, free for GWT users, therefore further drive the adoption of GWT in competition with Flex, SilverLight.  Read more... (268 words, estimated 1:04 mins reading time)

Compared with advances in other application development, the rich Web application development using Java is not quite there yet. Instead of simplifying JavaScript, AJAX, and JSF, we need a new head start. Don’t get me wrong, some of them are still needed and continue to work well for plain Web applications.

“Develop Once, Run Everywhere”

Adobe Flex has done a fairly good job for Web. Even better the same code can be easily tweaked to run as a standalone application with Adobe AIR. This was once an expectation for Java when it first came out to run as an Applet. Somehow it didn’t succeed in its birth place, but gained its ground at the server side instead.

JavaFX from Sun is a nice try but too late in the game. More importantly, Sun is not a client software company like Microsoft who was also late with SliverLight but has client side expertise and managed to compete. I don’t think Sun will reclaim its already lost client market at all, and therefore JavaFX is likely a candidate to be axed after Oracle’s acquisition. The investment on JavaFX should have gone to Java Swing, which is a lackluster compared with IBM SWT.  Read more... (584 words, 1 image, estimated 2:20 mins reading time)