The web is abuzz today with Google’s entrance to the web browser war-field with its shiny new Chrome beta. You’ll find plenty of coverage elsewhere (Google’s blog is here, the comic strip (more about it later) starts here), I’d only like to focus on one conspiracy theory aspect: the first version of Google OS.

First of all, do read the comic strip by Scott McCloud and the Chrome Team. It is in itself a piece of marketing art and although its primary intended audience may be journalists and less technical people, it is a statement of how serious Google is about Chrome and full of hints for conspiracy theorists among us.

So some of my first thoughts will follow…

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./ just reported that the USPTO granted Morfik a patent for JST (JavaScript Synthesis Technology). The patent covers the synthesis of JavaScript virtually from any high-level language, including “Ada, C, C++, C#, COBOL, ColdFusion, Common Lisp, Delphi, Fortran,
Java, Object Pascal, SmallTalk, Visual Basic, and Visual Basic.NET“.

It will be interesting to see how this will affect GWT and some other similar toolkits. The Morfik technology behind the patent is in development for quite some time (since around 2000, AFAIK), but many will try to find “prior art”, a lot of them unfortunately without reading the patent itself.

I will be doing an in-depth technical review of the patent (as soon as I get a legitimate copy) from a Morfik developer perspective, so stay tuned…

Hatem @ AJAX Magazine wrote a very good primer on Morfik architecture — a good read for anyone.

Dan Webb has some important thoughts about the Flash v.s. Ajax debate and the comments on his site and on the Ajaxian site are also thought provoking.

Indeed it is anyone’s guess how WPF/E, Flash/Flex/OpenLaszlo, AJAX (Backbase, YUI, Dojo, Prototype, Qooxdoo,…), GWT, Eclipse/RAP and Morfik will mature but this year will be definitely very interesting for web application development!

Google Search and other similar crawlers have a difficult time with AJAX applications: they were tuned for full-page-load style traditional web content and don’t adapt well for single-page web applications, where many times there are no well identified URLs for different content and getting to content in the first place is trickier than following a few links (did I mention Flash-based apps?). And still, for most of these sites getting into searches (i.e. exposure) is essential.

ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol) is a new initiative from the international publishing community to turn the challenges facing the industry from web technologies (especially search) into opportunities in a win-win way, and as a side effect can help Web Applications out, too.

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Google has embraced Morfik technology full-heartedly:

“Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a Java development framework that lets you escape the matrix of technologies that make writing AJAX applications so difficult and error prone. With GWT, you can develop and debug AJAX applications in the Java language using the Java development tools of your choice. When you deploy your application to production, the GWT compiler to translates your Java application to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.”

It must be a superb moment for the Morfik team to see that one of the biggest players in the software industry found Morfik’s technology very valuable and decided it was an important piece of its own AJAX software portfolio (and probably a basis of their own WebOS?).

I am really interested in how this develops!