How do I create a web browser app?
There are so many web gadgets on the Internet, that are just begging to be adapted for Windows, like Google Gadgets (http://www.google.com/webmasters/gadgets/) But what's the easiest way to do it? Is it possible with MS Visual Basic 2008 SP1? Any other (easy) way to do it?
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The race is on to dominate the web gadgets. Microsoft is introducing Silverlight, Adobe is merging Air/Flex/Flash and Java has a new scripting language called JavaFX. And, you mentioned GWT, google's web toolkit. So, you are at the pioneering stage of it all is the answer.
JavaFX works well with the NetBeans IDE. Google GWT works well with the Eclipse IDE as a plug-in. It remains to be seen how Adobe will handle Flash creation tools. Flash is installed in 90% of the current web browsers. Microsoft will have a problem with Linux. It is my hope that JavaFX can emerge as a principal player because JavaFX runs on any platform and anything -- such as cell phones, TV, embedded computers and computers.
That's the goals of Mozilla Prism (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Prism ) and Google Chrome
That is to make a web application and desktop application indistinguishable. They have limited success though, since for that goal to succeed, it require the whole user base to change their mindset about what is web application and what is desktop application.
Web application has the advantage of universal availability, nearly any OS on earth has browsers that supports Javascript and a carefully written browser-based application is almost automatically cross-platform. With Prism and Chrome, things like when double clicking a shortcut in your desktop then a web application (perhaps Google Docs/Writely or online calendar, etc) shows up instead of typical native program written in Visual Basic or other traditional programming language.