The Cafes » AJAX

Last night I went to the New York City Java User’s Group to hear about AJAX toolkits, more specifically OpenLaszlo and GWT, both presented by their respective developers. It was an excellent idea to do these two talks on the same night since it made it really easy to compare and contrast the two approaches.

I came away with a definite preference for GWT, though it’s hard to tell if that’s because of the toolkits themselves or just because of my preference for the speakers. The OpenLaszlo presentation was classic PowerPoint bullets read off the screen, along with some reasonably cool demos. The GWT presentation was done completely in Eclipse with smaller, less impressive demos. The first GWT sample code was Hello World, as it should be, so I really felt like I could see how to get this working and understand how to use it. The OpenLaszlo sample code was too complex to follow just by glancing at the screen, though likely it did something more.
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