An increasing number of companies are directing their attention to AJAX, this new Mecca of Internet pages, and each of them is offering developers different frameworks, suitable for their needs.

After Adobe and its Spry, it was the online searching leader's turn to come with an offer. This is called Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and is a Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers "who don't speak browser quirks as a second language".

Google mentions that GWT's purpose is to ease the process of creating dynamic web applications.

"Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatibilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript's lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile."

One can easily observe a difference between Spry and GWT, the first using HTML, CSS and very little JavaScript, and the latter relying on Java.

Google says that Google Web Toolkit offers automatic support for IE, Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, and Opera with no browser detection or special-casing within the code.

The applications created with GWT can be run in two modes:

Hosted mode: the application is run as Java bytecode within the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

Web mode: In web mode, the application is run as pure JavaScript and HTML, compiled from your original Java source code with the GWT Java-to-JavaScript compiler.

Google Web Toolkit has been certified by Softpedia as being 100% CLEAN and is available for download here.