Wednesday, October 6, 2010

For RIA in JavaScript, GWT is the most sane option

I just tried again coding a rich web UI with:

- Dojo (and DojoX and Dijit, including dojox.data)
- Ext JS by Sencha (including the data store)
- Prototype

The conclusion is: I missed Google GWT.

JavaScript OOP is such a complex beast that pretty much you have to do it by memory: IDE's won't help much (if at all) on this.

Since a GWT app is written in Java programming language, it comes with all the goodies a good Java IDE (Eclipse) can provide, and that is excellent code completion, refactoring, and error checking support.

Other JavaScript toolkits will require an additional "minification" phase. In GWT it's part of the build process: the app is guaranteed to be small & optimized.

Java does have its limits, such as its static-ness. Projects such as DWR can generate Java stubs. But when you play by Java's rules (including autogenerating stubs) you get back the nice IDE features and sometimes easier debugging. Oh joy. :)

For non-RIA type pages though, either jQuery, Dojo Core, or Prototype rocks. (though I am biased to jQuery due to ubiquity)

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