After sleeping for 45 minutes at the hotel, it was time for the much anticipated Smackdown for AJAX Programming Models and Frameworks. I really wanted to see how everyone was going to handle the GWT contender released during JavaOne. Strangely enough none of the Google guys were present. They had been invited, but reportedly didn't like much the setup for the event. Oh well.
They had Alex Russell from the Dojo toolkit, Chet Haase which is a Swing guy, Christophe Coenraets from the Flex camp, Ed Burns which is the co-lead of the JSF JSR, and finally Joe Walker who created DWR. A kind of disappointing set of people. Flex? Swing? Sorry, that is not Ajax.
Interesting question to the audience: Who are enthusiastic about using Flex in their next project? Only about two persons raised their hands, which means Flex is not going to take off. Someone also pointed out that the Flex plugin is up-to-date only on Windows and on the Mac. On Linux it is pretty old, version 7. The really cheap computers of the future ($100 computers) are likely to run Linux, and they should be first class Flex citizens.
Finally someone in the audience asked what I think is the critical question: What do you think of Googles GWT? Alex Russell was the only one that answered, and he thought their programming model was a bad idea. Well well well. Not that many other interesting questions turned up, so I was disappointed.