Have you ever listened to your travel agent when she was talking to the airline, confirming your flight? I have. Did you wonder how can she remember all those Alfa-Bravo-Charlie? I did.

If you haven't and didn't, but are interested in Google Web Toolkit or Microsoft OpenService Accelerators, or just want to play with cool-but-mostly-useless-gadget, keep reading.

So, after struggling to memorize that useful way of spelling, I finally had decided to help myself by writing a small utility to spell any text travel-agent-style. Well... it turned out that it's better known as NATO Phonetic Alphabet, "more formally the international radiotelephony spelling alphabet".

Problem #1 was which language to choose. How about Google Web Toolkit? You write piece of Java code, compile and get fully functional JavaScript. You can even use Eclipse debugger if the first version is not "fully" functional.

Problem #2 was the task seemed rather boring. But few days later I learned about Internet Explorer 8 Accelerators. Let me tell you: Microsoft did not come up with such a brilliant idea for a very long time (since about .NET 3.5 :)

And here is the result of combining dev tools from Google and Microsoft technologies! Please, welcome "Translate to NATO Alphabet" gadget and an accelerator:

If you wonder whether you can have the source or just install this gadget on your own site or blog, you'll have to wait until the next update to this article.