By Richard Koman
Google has released Google Web Toolkit 1.5, which now supports Java 5. Bruce Johnson, Google's engineering manager, said the toolkit will let developers focus on Web applications rather than desktop platforms by resolving browser incompatibilities. Google also opened Google App Engine to let more developers host applications on its servers.
At the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco this week, the search giant announced a new version of its Web development kit and opened up its hosted Google App Engine to more developers.
Web applications written with Google Web Toolkit 1.5, which now supports Java 5, will run 1.2 to two times faster, said Bruce Johnson, Google's engineering manager. The toolkit is a step toward making the Web — not Windows, Mac or Linux — the computing layer that developers are concerned with.
"There's no question any more whether you're going to target the browser or a desktop app," Johnson said. "For almost any new exciting app, you're going to target the browser."
Microsoft's 'Market to Lose'
For a certain class of programs, Johnson said, the Web is "already better than what you can do on the desktop." He added: "For extremely low-latency applications, like video editing, I think we're still a couple years out."
Such statements are nothing less than a shot across Microsoft's bow — and while establishing the Web as a competitor to Windows is still an uphill battle, Google should not be underestimated here, said Rob Enderle, principal analyst with the Enderle Group.
"There is little doubt the browser is the best common denominator for new applications," Enderle said, "but the problem is that most people don't have network connections that are fast enough to live on it." That kind of connectivity likely won't come for a decade, which gives Microsoft a sizable window of time to fight back, he added.
"This is still Microsoft's market to lose, but to beat Google they have to lead and not follow to this new capability — and they have lost focus on their core defenses to this attack: Windows, Office and IE," Enderle said. "Google can't do this without Microsoft's help because people just don't change very quickly, and Google doesn't yet have the developer support to make this a reality."
But Google is leading the way — and Microsoft is "bleeding developers," Enderle said. "So, yes, they can do this, but Microsoft is still in a position to block if they can execute quickly enough. IBM in the '90s against Microsoft was a lesson in what not to do."
Navigating Browser Incompatibility
Google Web Toolkit helps developers quickly create Web applications by serving as a translation device between Java code and the JavaScript language built into browsers. Why not write directly in JavaScript? One of the biggest problems with Web development has been the multiplicity of ways in which popular browsers implement Web standards like Cascading Style Sheets and JavaScript. Earlier versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, especially, implemented the standards poorly, but Apple's Safari also featured odd implementations.
For developers, that has meant many hours of painstaking work-arounds to get their applications to behave properly and uniformly on all platforms. "Not all the JavaScript standards are interpreted in different ways," Johnson said. "The truth is it's a minefield." Leaving the problem of accommodating different browsers to the toolkit should be a huge win for developers. With support for Java 5, Google Web Toolkit reduces the chances of programming errors and enables faster JavaScript, Johnson said. The new version supports Microsoft Internet Explorer, Apple's Safari, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Webkit, on which the browsers on Apple's iPhone and Google's Android are based. Google also announced pricing plans and application-programming interfaces for Google App Engine, which lets developers run applications hosted on Google's "cloud" infrastructure App Engine is free for starters — 500 megabytes of storage |
–
Welcome to check my blog: http://unitedstatesofearthbycozec.blogspot.com/
—————————————————————-
