After playing a little with GWT, and attempting to add a map into my little webapp, I’ve found that this is really a very good idea. By applying a language to abstract all the small difficulties of programming a webpage for different browsers, you essentially move a larger percentage of the work into actually making the application.

Although GWT isn’t perfect, and to get my app up and running I had to spend about an hour or so searching the internet about fixing up some XMLs to import the libraries properly, once that was done, the source code that involved adding a map to the page and a little Javascript button coule fit on the screen, it is a huge step over having to deal with the difficulties faced by web programmers to make their sites both compatible with IE and Firefox.

Though I advocate using the minimum amount of cool new features on your site, GWT would be the next step toward progress with the current mess that is web application programming right now.