Cody Burleson and I looked at Google's Web Development Toolkit (GWT) when it cam out in 2007. We even build some small applications to test it. We liked it because it seemed like a good bridge between the enterprise world of J2EE development and the lightweight, web 2.0, AJAX driven applications of today. Now Google has released the 2.0 version of the product. What remains the most promising of this is that complier. Which takes code and compiles it for the web and applies all kinds of magic to make it lighter, faster, and better in many ways. Take a look at the video below. To me the most telling part was the testimony from the Google Wave team "“ with 100's of developers working on dozen of feature the JS code alone grew to over 1.5mb. I' know from experience that when you get just 2 or 3 people working on the same complex application, optimization and looking for reuse opportunities becomes a project in and of itself. Delegating some of that work to a smart complier looks like a brilliant idea.
I'm also keen on taking a look at the Speed Tracer"¦Looks like a winner to me.
If you have tried either of these, I'd love to hear about it.