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Now that Yahoo and Google are becoming partners for search ads, can GWT-YUI be far behind? Even though Google eventually buying Yahoo outright probably won’t happen due to antitrust implications, a GWT-YUI combination seems to kill two birds with one silver bullet. One of the most common complaints against GWT is the lack of good-looking advanced widgets which YUI can provide. YUI is difficult to use since its API is way too low-level compared to alternatives like Ext JS, therefore it definitely needs an abstraction layer like GWT on top of it to provide simple reusable widgets and good IDE support. GWT is licensed under Apache and YUI has a BSD license, so GWT-YUI can advertise itself as the RIA solution with the most business-friendly license as compared to Flex, Silverlight, and JavaFX.

Google already uses YUI Grids CSS for iGoogle, so why not take it one step further?

http://www.google.com/ig

There have been a few attempts to extend GWT with advanced widgets that I know of, but none of them has turned out to be compelling in the long run.

GWT Incubator offers a glimpse into the future of GWT, and still does not provide a complete widget toolkit for my needs. It is officially supported by the GWT team which is a plus.

Until a couple of months ago, I thought my search was over with GWT-Ext. The project has done an admirable effort to continue since the earthquake from the second Ext JS license change, but without a plan to migrate to a solid foundation - i.e. anything but Ext JS - it seems too risky to use it for now. I am still keeping an eye on this project.

The possibility of a GWT-SmartClient raised my hopes for a few weeks since SmartClient seems to be very similar to Ext JS and is still LGPL. However, that possibility went nowhere fast. The creator of GWT-Ext never responded publicly to the proposal from SmartClient, and the SmartClient team never followed up on its forum as promised. SmartClient lost a golden opportunity to grab major market share from Ext JS in my opinion.

http://forums.smartclient.com/showthread.php?t=1849

MyGWT switched its license to GPL, so it is useless for me.

I searched for a GWT-Flex project, but could not find any. This is yet another combination that would make a lot of sense.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 13th, 2008 at 10:22 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.