Technologists working on the next generation of Web application technologies scoff at the idea that a JavaScript renaissance is going to threaten their vision of the future. Instead, they insist Google's rising tide is lifting their boats.
"For a company serving that many people at that scale, Google is taking uncharacteristic risks on their front end to do things that other companies with old infrastructures in place don't know are even possible," said Laszlo's Temkin. "I'm incredibly happy that Google is taking this step, because it's forcing the market to realize what to us has been incredibly obvious about rich Internet applications. It's forcing the portals and others to notice the value here. That's tremendous for us."
By the same token, Google denies any ideological attachment to its standards-based approach. Instead, the company says it has evaluated all the options before it and will continue to do so as new technologies become available or existing ones get refined.
The JavaScript approach, Google acknowledges, leaves some things to be desired. For example, it's harder to integrate applications with third-party applications.
In the final analysis, however, Google has given JavaScript that crucial programming designation: good enough.
"We've considered these other things, and we've talked about some of the other options, but thus far the technologies haven't gotten to the point where we feel the need to switch to them," said Paul Buchheit, the Google engineer who spearheaded the Gmail project.
"If something like Avalon or Mozilla's XUL (Extensible User Interface Language) were to become powerful and common enough, that would be interesting to us," Buchheit said.
Ultimately, any push away from JavaScript and other DHTML technologies may stem less from the improvement of other options than from the demands of the applications.
"Google is a first step or second step, not an end point," Temkin said. "The successors to Word and Excel and Powerpoint are not going to be written this way. It's just not going to happen."
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