I’ve been playing around with GWT recently, Google’s toolkit for making Gmail-like applications in Java. The idea is pretty slick: you write both the client (web browser) and server portions in Java, and then it translates the client-side Java into several dialects of Javascript (one for each of the major web browsers.) You get to use a Java debugger and keep all your code in one language, without having to learn all the nuances of each web browser. It works great if you’re writing something that works like Gmail, but it’s totally inappropriate if you just want to add a few flashy effects to a web page.

That said, here’s an example of something I whipped together in GWT. For the record, my three-year-old thinks it’s funny, most people think it’s mildly creepy, and Seebs says it’s disturbing to autistic people like himself– but only due to color asymmetry.