RIA trends

Always seeking for new trends in software development especially in the Java universe I found this post interesting.

The strong increasing demand of the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) was surprising me most although it is not widely spreaded in absolute figures.

But after years of web development with Struts/JSP and XML-rendering I was lucky to learn (again) how comfortable GUI development could be using RCP/SWT in the current project. So its not surprising at all that GWT will be successful offering a convenient programming model.

Although GWT is based on conventional web technolgoies like java script and html/css I'm not sure if this is really an advantage. In the meantime many users (like me too) are spoilt by rich GUI-features, such as offered by Flash or IPod/IPhone apps.

GWT will always only offer as much features as java script and html/css in different browser will do.

Other tools like Silverlight, Java FX and Adobe Flash/Flex offer a similar programming model with the ability of richer GUI features. But this flexibility has its price by needing a plugin as runtime environment although f.e. the flash plugin is easy available and broadly installed.

Some more interesting statements about the future of RIA technologies I found in the RIA Blog.

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