Well I've finally joined much of the rest of the human race and decided to start a blog. As a record of things I've been playing with or interested by, the most recent thing would be the Google Web Toolkit. For those who haven't been reading any websites over the last few days, this is a toolkit for building web applications and websites that has been released by Google that's almost entirely AJAX based.
It allows you to write the UI for your browser pages in Java, using an API similar to SWT/Swing. Your Java code is then run through the GWT compiler which turns it into cross-browser compatible Javascript. A small HTML page contains links to your GWT application module, and the toolkit code takes care of the rest.
The toolkit has a built in test environment that also be coupled to Eclipse for debugging purposes, so you can step through any code that's proving troublesome, making it far more convenient than any Javascript debugger that I've seen (although the MS one is passable)
As far as licencing goes, it's pretty reasonable (IMHO!) - the provided runtime components, are Apache 2.0 licenced, while the compiler and development tools are closed-source and non-redistributable, but still free as in beer. Anything you create as output from the compiler is yours to licence and do with as you will, including commercial applications. In essence it's a free (beer) royalty-free development tool.
Having played with it for a few days now, it's definitely very cool, and something that will definitely take off. There's a lot of polishing to be done yet (not much in the way of component documentation), but it's already incredibly useful.
