Question

Does anyone know any sane reason for such bundling decision? Google engineers act wisely in most cases, so this kinda surprized me.

This would cause collisions with other versions of servlet API pulled via Maven dependencies:

• webapp classpath will likely contain
  version which is bundled with GWT;
• container may refuse to load the GWT
  jar as it contains the javax.servlet
  package;
• in most cases this will
  likely deviate classpaths across your
  IDE’s debugger and the really
  executing VM.

Link to the jar in question (just so you see the same thing after unzipping as I do, if you don’t believe that GWT contains servlet API classes in the same jar):
http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/com/google/gwt/gwt-user/1.7.0/gwt-user-1.7.0.jar

Answer 1

You shouldn’t be including gwt-dev.jar or gwt-user.jar in your war file. You only need gwt-servlet.jar in your war, and that too only if you are using RPC. If you notice, gwt-servlet.jar (ironically) does not contain any of the servlet classes.

• gwt-dev.jar contains the compilers and linkers. Your code will never need this to compile.
• gwt-user.jar contains the gwt framework that ultimately gets translated to javascript. You only need this during development mode.
• gwt-servlet.jar contains the server side code that is needed if you use RPC framework. This is the only jar that should be present in your war file.