I really appreciated this post. Everything Alex mentioned in his article I learned through trial by fire doing mobile development. Performance was critical and UI responsiveness was a must. It was then that it dawned on me that all the same techniques could be applied to a web application just like Alex mentioned. Most web developers seem to get stuck in the framework rut. All the tools and techniques are there to build something fast and responsive.
If there is one thing I can truly appreciate about what he is trying to do with spine it's the client id generation and request queueing. This has got to be the core of what makes good "AUI". Every developer dealing with remote requests should have this in their back pocket. 101 stuff.
I don't know about anyone else, but using CouchDB feels like I am writing nothing but stored procedures to return the simplest of searches in CouchDB land.
Where as MongoDB has a simple search syntax that I can create on the fly if needed in my code.
It just reads beautifully. Otherwise working with Objective-C was like pulling teeth at times. It had been a long time since I had to write so much code to get such simple things done.
Just to beat a dead horse, most languages, especially scripting languages compile down to something else. I don't use GWT, but I could understand the lure of using a known language that has established great tools to create a powerful web applications. From what I understand it will even optimize then obfuscate the javascript for you. As for the degradation argument, that is a weak negative.