Encoded

Well not yet, but I found that headline so catchy, I couldn’t resist.

This post is just a pointer over to Joel on Software’s recent post titled Strategy Letter VI. In his post, Joel explores the death of Lotus and rise of Wordperfect and what this historical reference might mean for AJAX web applications - using Gmail as an example. You’ll have to get past the first few graphs about the rise of Lotus to see the relevance, but it’s worth the read, but then again, there aren’t too many posts on that blog that aren’t worth your time.

I’m not sure Joel is aware of the Google Desktop SDK Google Web Toolkit. I’m certainly no authority on Google’s products, but I believe their SDK is Java-based and compiles down to HTML & JavaScript - something that Joel hints at as a solution for AJAX development in his post. When I played with the Google SDK, everything I built looked so much like Gmail, I couldn’t see how Google developers wouldn’t have used their own SDK to write the Gmail application.

P.S. read more about why writers & bloggers love catchy headlines and why it’s terrible for SEO in my That monster called SEO post.