The best answer I can give is that Google got it right – first – especially with releasing their API, and earned a lot of developer friends. These days you’re right: local.live.com is very impressive and in many ways better, but I’ve honestly only used it once or twice. Habit, I guess.

Thats nothing particularly new. Web nerds have been hassling Flash nerds about it for years, it’s interesting to see the Linux/Googley nerds mouthing the same arguments Flash designers have used albeit from a slightly different perspective.

You should check out flex, with you can create a flash application that talks directly to Plain Old Java Objects.

I think the big deal with GWT is the actual use of an IDE. (Coming from an OO development background I often miss the integrated tools an IDE can provide. Our current web development practices don’t really lend themselves to this.)

Anyway, back to GWT, Google seems to be gearing this thing up for writing actual desktop-like web apps, making an IDE sort of a necessity. You’ll be able to attach a debugger to a web application, test it locally, and then “publish” it as a Javascript/HTML page. I’m assuming the servlets will be developed in the same IDE, which should really make everything super nice to work with and maintain.

So I guess I’m excited, but not sold. I need to do a lot more research.

It reminds me of some debates I’ve read about Ruby on Rails: it’s great for new development, but not so great trying to pull existing sites forward. Hopefully this toolkit can avoid that.