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Tonight I was reading through SourceForge's newsletter, and one of the top 25 projects is a relatively new one call ThinWire. There are a lot of existing frameworks out there for making AJAX applications look like "desktop applications," and often they allow you to dispense with programming in HTML and Javascript. Examples include Morfik, Google Web Toolkit, and even a Python version: Pyjamas. With most frameworks, while they looked good, they were often heavy (large download), or left something to be desired in the aesthetics department. Thinwire looks to change that. Take a look at their Playground Demo for examples of the full range of the tool kit, then look at their mail demo to see just how close to the "desktop feel" they get. They are even working on a graphical form designer that is written using the framework itself. Now there's power! And they claim in only a 100K download. Lest you think this is a toy framework, they also have a video showing a production application written using ThinWire. From their site:

This application has over 300 data input forms and dialogs with a wide range of complexity. It has a business rules engine that toggles the visibility of fields, required state of fields, limits dropdown options and much more....There are no page refreshes involved in updating anything within ThinWire®, the page is modified on the fly as a result of user actions that trigger event listeners on the server. Like all applications built with ThinWire®, no client-side code or HTML was written; all logic resides on the server.

One teaser that caught my eye is on their front page where they say you can develop using Java, or "alternatively, use a scripting language." I can't find further explanation of that, but if I could program in this framework using Python, I think we would have a real winner.

They are gunning for the Duke's Choice Award, so if you have experiences with ThinWire, or want to try it out, they are looking for company and developer feedback as part of the nomination process. I'll certainly be following the development efforts.