

Ask HN: Has anyone successfully developed a large GWT application? - wclax04

So my real job wants me to be a GWT developer.  Any advice?
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buster
I'd be interested in experience, tips and comparisons, too! Especially how GWT
compares to extJS and jQuery in terms of performance, ease of use,
customization (complex ui design and implementation), maintainability, tools,
benefits overall.. was wondering for some time now but didn't get around to
use GWT for some project, yet :(

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papaf
I was writing a small hobby project (a web email frontend) and abandoned GWT
for ExtJS. I got a lot more done with a lot less code. Personally, I find
javascript a more powerful language than java for writing event driven
applications.

The advantage of using java is access to libraries, but at the time most of
the libraries I was interested in wouldn't compile into a GWT application.

~~~
buster
Interestingly, a rather big/complex web ui was done in extJS and it looks like
extJS will be abandoned for new projects, mainly due to: little control over
generated html/css and big performance issues, not i18n support, no code
splitting, no unit tests and some other problems that seem to be solved in
GWT. I, for one, am suspicious if GWT is really the better way, basically
adding anotehr layer between browser and sourcecode. My feeling points me more
in the direction of jQuery, which probably doesn't do all this out of the box
but many of this from plugins.

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oomkiller
Hmm, if you already know Java, or like Java, go for it. Otherwise I'd avoid it
and use something like ExtJS or similar.

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GrandMasterBirt
Why not? If they paying you to train in it, there is nothing wrong with GWT.
It might not be the best framework to do things in, or it might be, but the
learning experience alone might be worth it. You can easily transfer those
skills to Java Swing development and Adobe Flex.

So doet!

