The Keene View

I ranted a bit more on this topic here at WebGuild and here at Ajaxian
 

You take on a sacred cow, you're likely to get the attention of a few cowboys. My piece drew a rant from this Eclipse-bigot. The priceless quote from him was "Chris Keene doesn't understand get Eclipse, and therefore I don't think he gets Ajax either." Ajax is a good plug-in for Eclipse, but Ajax doesn't need a heavy-weight IDE to succeed, it needs a lightweight tool!
 

I'm curious, what's your definition of lightweight? DreamWeaver?

Eclipse cowboys there may be, but I don't get the aggressive anti-Eclipse take, either. In fact, to use the blog model, what I think people find appealing about Eclipse is its open, community-based, extensible nature, which is exactly what attracts some of us to platforms like WordPress. Don't get me wrong: Eclipse, WordPress, doesn't matter, all of these are imperfect tools and none is the right solution to everything. But to me, Eclipse is part of the puzzle as far as exactly what you describe. And "visual" and "lightweight" are two different things ... Eclipse might not satisfy those two principles, but neither do some of your examples.
 

I think their is a gap in the thin client space that will be filled by the likes of RAP, Java2JavaScript, or GWT that is being overlooked by the purest on the Web 2.0 side. Not all Java development is server sided development. A good portion is purely for desktop tools. I'm currently in a situation where my company has a mixture of mostly desktop (Java Swing, SWT, .NET) tools and a dabble of thin client tools (Isomorphic, Dojo) across numerous teams. We are looking to standardize on a platform and had presumed we would have to have a platform for thick tools and a different platform for thin tools. To me the ability to define a GUI tool that will have the potential of a substantial shared code base that has a deployment pattern for both thick and thin clients makes huge sense from the viewpoint of established OO build and test practices. I understand that it might not be true client side AJAX and that it may be slower than an app written by Web2.0 gurus. However my gut tells me that the potential development savings in time and resources of bringing GUI tools to market will win the day for us and other companies looking for thick and thin tools who's primary development is thick client.

I see a potential deployment pattern where an administrator installs a thin client app on a server and informs all their intranet users of the product. The users start using the thin client tool and some decide that they are using it so much that they click the web-installer of the desktop version because they are more accustomed to working this way. This satisfies both sets of users while reducing the admin headache.
 

@Ronan, I think there is a very good use case for a Java-driven client like GWT, RAP or SWT.

My focus is on users coming from the visual tool world (Notes, PowerBuilder, Access, VB) for whom Java/Eclipse is too heavyweight.

Our hope at ActiveGrid is to provide a visual platform for building web apps, while making sure that the generated apps meet IT requirements (e.g., run in Java server, etc).

The exciting thing about Ajax is that it opens the door to rich visual tooling that will be both familiar and attractive to developers coming from the visual tool world.