Hi Reader,

I am going to tell you the truth. I was not looking forward to writing the javascript necessary to get BrewSession going. For one thing I am a stickler for strict separation of behavior and content. Cascading Style Sheets are great because they keep the page content from getting lost in the necessary formatting to make a pretty-looking page – there is no equivalent for keeping javascript from obfuscating the stuff on your page.

I have a working prototype for keeping javascript off the page, but I feel like it is just one more thing I need to finish before I can get to the real programming. MochiKit is nice to program with, but laying the foundation for a cool sparkley web site was dragging on.

Enter the Google Web Toolkit. It “…is an open source Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications … easy for developers who don’t speak browser quirks as a second language.” Using swing-like widgets and panels, you can quickly put together a functioning app. I do not know swing or even much java, however that is not the obstacle to which I alluded in this post’s title.

I’ve been steaming out a mini-app for … let’s call them a client. It’s quite easy and I’m pleased with the toolkit. I can already see the pieces working together for BrewSession. Now round-about to the problem. It is not currently well-integrated with Rails.

Allow me to geek out on you. Rails is an MVC architecture with great M and C tools and decent V tools. The community believes in doing it yourself, leaning towards being elitist about it. I already have a great start to developing BrewSession into a full-fledged REST service thanks to Rails. I still love working with ruby and am going to keep rails on the server side. All I need to do is get BrewSession, written in GWT, to consume the REST service.

Searching the google group for the toolkit brings up a whole lotta nothing, so it looks like I have to do it myself. The way things are going I will someday refer to myself as a programmer rather than a sys admin.

–Dean