I know this has been asked before but I’d like to ask it here and see what happens.
What do Google’s developers use to implement their sites like http://translate.google.com/ for instance. When I look at the source of the page, I’m not immediately seeing anything GWT.
I’ve been working on a few GWT projects and my experiences with it have been mixed. The advantages are obvious, and I’ve created dynamic scheme making client-server communication even more transparent. But the downsides have been nagging PITA pretty much. Erroneous hard to find anomalies. Slow building process (I’m familiar with the optimizations and tuning to improve development cycles). Layout hell (css). Plus problems developing for mobiles. No devmode, need various tricks to let me debug and probe inner state. Problems with specific mobiles (eg. Acer A500 disappearing keyboard problem). Mobiles not scaling UI properly. The list of issues goes on and on.
I have the feeling that Google is perfectly well aware of the pitfalls of GWT and use something much better internally for their own apps. Does anyone know how they develop their sites?
The admin pages for Adwords is as far as I know done with GWT, as was wave.
For some projects they have used the Closure library
Gmail is one of these I think.