The only part that I’ve found to be useful and worth reading are security howtos that are actually quite good. Besides that Doctype has lot of catching up to do.

Still, great idea and a challenge for community I think

This is one of the ways JS developers can approach the way GWT works. You invent a new DSL, call it JS++, where you adhere to a certain idiomatic naming scheme, package scheme, etc. You might even use JSDoc to declare types. Then, you build a bunch of command line tools to process the JS based on required idioms, and as long as people adhere to the idioms, you can aggressively optimize and package the JS.

Much of the perceived “bloat” is probably due to maintaining idiomatic format for everything. For example, if they were to use other techniques like defining methods by looping over an array (e.g. ["foo", "bar", "baz"].each(function(name) { window[name] = … } ) as some JS libraries do, it would totally break assumptions that a compiler makes.

I would bet that Google’s JS library in practice produces smaller code downloaded than most of the JS libraries on the internet which use open source packers/minifiers.

wonder if anyone will be able to contribute code or just googlers (like in YUI). will they have widgets or just stick to the low level stuff?

http://doctype.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/goog/
http://simonwillison.net/2008/May/14/revision/