
Google+ Technological Details - DanielRibeiro
http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/07/Google-Plus
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clintjhill
I would love to hear why GWT wasn't used more. It seems to me that GWT is not
widely used even at Google.

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mark_l_watson
I use GWT (and SmartGWT which is based on GWT) a fair amount, and this is just
my opinion:

GWT is targeted at Java developers who want to create rich client
applications. The development environment (I use IntelliJ) is reasonably agile
and there is a rich set of components to use. So, a nice developer experience
for Java developers who don't want to use other languages (like Javascript).

That said, GWT seems a little heavy weight and for large and well funded
projects it makes sense to hire Javascript experts and then frameworks like
JQuery or Clojure probably make much more sense.

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nl
_frameworks like JQuery or Clojure probably make much more sense_

I think you meant Closure[1] (not Clojure)?

[1] <http://code.google.com/closure/>

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jrydberg
Is google killing GWT?

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RyanDScott
I doubt it. Based on the number of sessions at Google IO this year for GWT
(many) and the number of sessions for Closure (one?), I would say they were
outwardly pushing GWT much more than Closure.

I wish they would come out with more JavaScript tools. I have used GWT for a
couple side projects, and while the tools and library are amazing, writing an
app the "GWT Way" (using all the design patterns) is cumbersome and difficult,
especially for a one-man-show.

Closure is better in this regard (mostly by virtue of being a JavaScript
library instead of a Java library, IMO), but it's still overkill for quick
side projects where something like underscore.js would suffice.

Why would they use Closure instead of GWT? Closure is just JavaScript. No
waiting for the GWT team to build the features you need, no having to build
those features yourself. And in my experience, when I need cutting edge with
GWT, I end up writing a bunch of wrappers for JavaScript functions, which
makes me wonder why I'm not writing everything in JavaScript. (Like I said,
the GWT library is very compelling and when planning a large project, Java
often feels more comfortable for some.)

So no, I doubt they are killing GWT, but it would sure be nice to see them
develop some comparable JavaScript tooling (as one of their main points for
choosing Java as the language of GWT is because of the quality of the existing
Java tools).

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protagonist_h
Java? so uncool! I wonder why Google doesn't use one of those sexy functional
languages. They could at least use Scala.

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mattdeboard
I know this is some heavy-handed sarcasm but even still, "sexy" is not a word
I think many people would use to describe functional languages.

