My friend and I want to develop a big web2.0 project. We decided to write it in Java because we love it and we are good at it and the other libraries which we will use are written in Java (Apache Lucene, Apache Cassandra …). and we choose GWT as a framework. We love google, google technologies, google apis.
and I want to ask do you think that GWT is suitable to launch the big projects like youtube, twitter, wikipedia and other… ? Is gwt-rpc mechanism reliable in big projects?
Well GWT is suitable for web applications and not web sites or web pages, GWT is suitable for applications like Gmail which is a BIG application yet contains a single page which has complex actions.
GWT fails in some projects with many pages, We used GWT in an ERP system which contained about 100 page each page represents CRUD operations + some business operations, GWT wasn’t the perfect choice.
Other thing GWT may fail in is that web crawlers can’t extract information from javascript files generated by GWT. Search engines prefer static HTML generated from server side, and not generated on client side by javascript as GWT does. So, Google search engine will not give results from your site.
In summary, GWT is suitable for web applications with fewer number of pages and more complex actions.