MX Traveler

Neat interaction with images by Andries Odendaal

This little Director goodie is done by Andries Odendaal (from Wireframe fame) for Getty Images as part of their "10 ways to interact" campaign. More innovation to be found at http://interact10ways.com

Google approach to AJAX development

At the start of the 2006 JavaOne conference, Google releases their Google Web Toolkit. It's an interessting approach to AJAX development, where browser quirks and language are abstracted through various components such as development tools and UI libraries. The most notable part? A Java-to-Javascript compiler.

Basically, you write Java code and have the compiler creating Javascript 'stub' code ( i wonder if it's an all-or-nothing approach, ie, can generated code be modified ). See below for an example.

Other notable features:

• Hosted Browser Environment (  a sandbox so to say )
• Browser History Management
• Debugging
• Async RPC Calls

From my 5 minute review, the Toolkit comes with extended documentation including a 'Getting Started' guide to get you up and running quickly, an Internet Explorer control, class references and a commandline utility to create Eclipse projects.

Instead of 'forcing' the developer to learn yet-another-UI-language ( XAML/MXML/XUL ) it let's you stay in Java to write UI code. Whether or not that is the best approach is something i won't go into.

Google Web Toolkit - Build AJAX apps in the Java language