Question

I am interested in the possibility that GWT could serve as the basis for my entire presentation layer.

I would be interested to know if anyone has tried this successfully – or unsuccessfully – and could persuade or unpersuade me from attempting this.

Answer 1

I worked with GWT about a year ago. At the time it seemed like a great idea, with a number of caveats:

• I had ‘gotcha’ problems with some parts of the API, that were probably related to the fact that you’re coding as if you’re in java when in fact you’re actually writing for a separately compiled environment that acts like java, so you make some incorrect assumptions (in this case, passing nested values to the front end). I think there was another was rewriting my ant scripts to use a 32-bit jvm for the gwt compile.
• I spent a bit of time trying to tweak the appearence – we never deployed a finished project so I’m not sure how much work this would’ve taken to get to a professional level, but it seemed (logically) like it’d be comparable to tweaking a swing interface. maybe a bit more unwieldy, visually, than html.
• Because the ajax is so hidden from you in the final product, I had some concerns about what I might do if the performance was poor.

That being said,it definitely seems worth playing with, and my experiences were a long, long time ago in internet years, especially given that it’s probably much more mature now. It’s also worth pointing out that it’s a very different (and refreshing) way of developing GUI code from most MVC frameworks, and worth a look if for no other reason than that.

My feeling is that if you’re building a high-load professional site with very demanding graphical requirements GWT is probably not a good choice, otherwise ok.