ajax monkeying

todays attention span goes to having a look at that hype word ajax. so i wanted to try that out. my first geeking goal for this is to build a simple service that provides information on processed items from the server to the client (browser). and to make these updates in ajax style so as soon as an item is processed, the information is shown to the client.. whee

and what do i use to make all this happen? since i am most familiar lately with java, i decided to try it out with that. thats the server then. and for the client? ajax on the client is about javascript so should i just write javascript manually? maybe real geeks would do that to first learn the basics. that would certainly help with understanding how it all really works, which would also help in understanding all the real problems if i ever were to do real work with this stuff..

my old javascript nightmares remind me of all the bad times we had together when i used it to do some basic site updates long ago etc. so i try to look for some nice framework to help me.

gwt is something i have heard hyped, so i look at that.. certainly looks nice for anything that is mainly running on the browser. i find the connection to the server a bit strange, probably just because i have no idea how it all should work. json seems like a nice and simple notation to pass data, so i like that. but using it from gwt seems really painful, suddenly the java notation is gone and i am required to write code using javascript eval() function or something like that. it has other options, like gwt provided serialization of java objects. i don’t quite understand why i would want to use that though.. why not just let me use json with a simple gwt api and no javascript writing for me? well probably writing simple java data model objects for serialization would make it efficient with gwt anyway. but oh noes i liked much more the idea of json that could be used with any client technology.. not that it would matter in my example but hey thats the geek in me, always looking for what me thinks is perfect and over engineering everything, right?

so since i dont like these options and seems i need to use some custom framework communication anyways, i look at a bunch of other frameworks. it all seems very difficult to choose anything with too many options.. since my target example is not that heavy on the client side, i decide to try wicket. i have been watching it for some time as well thinking it might be nice as people seem to like it. so ooh i decide to try that..