

Google Relaunches Instantiations Developer Tools - abraham
http://googlewebtoolkit.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-relaunches-instantiations.html

======
petervandijck
Nice. Who has experience working with GWT? Is it easy to get stuff done in? To
work around its limitation (whatever they may be?) We're considering it for a
project, but I've never worked with it.

~~~
gthank
I think it depends on your perspective. If you like being a web developer,
then I strongly suspect GWT is not for you. A (non-comprehensive) list of
things that are likely to bother you if you're a web dev (and like it):

* Things like progressive enhancement and semantic markup might not be totally impossible, but they're definitely not the focus of the framework.

* The back button is broken by default; there's a work-around but you're probably used to getting that functionality for free.

* The GWT compile cycle is LONG.

* You pretty much _NEED_ to be using Eclipse (or possibly IntelliJ) instead of your text editor of choice.

* The final product probably won't feel like most web applications.

To be fair, people have written things like
[quake2-gwt](<http://code.google.com/p/quake2-gwt-port/>), so you _can_ get
something pretty awesome in exchange for these tradeoffs. Also, if you loathe
HTML and JavaScript, but you still need to get something up on the web, then
GWT might be just your ticket.

~~~
squidsoup
Some of these criticisms are a bit unfair I think.

History and back button support in GWT is very straightforward and trivial to
implement.
([http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/doc/latest/DevGuideCodingB...](http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/doc/latest/DevGuideCodingBasicsHistory.html))

The default compile cycle is long as GWT is compiling for multiple clients
targets (and potentially localisations). You can speed this up a great deal by
reducing compile permutations to 1 ([http://code.google.com/p/google-web-
toolkit-doc-1-5/wiki/FAQ...](http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit-
doc-1-5/wiki/FAQ_CompileOnePermutation)). You should probably also mention
that you don't need to recompile in development mode.

~~~
gthank
While there is a straightforward way to implement Back and History, the point
is that traditional web dev technologies give it to you for free, so it's one
more thing to think about.

Compile time definitely gets better if you reduce the number of targets, but
it still totally dominates most people's build times.

Not needing to recompile in dev mode is definitely a big win.

------
jbarham
Does anyone have experience using GWT but some language other than Java (e.g.,
Python, Ruby on Rails) for the server? How did it work out?

~~~
jonpaul
Before AppEngine, that's the only way I would write GWT apps. I loathe Tomcat.
(I know there are other J2EE servers). I used Rails on the backend. It worked
amazingly well.

~~~
rufugee
I'm looking to do this currently. Did you use gwtonrails or write your own
code to handle the communication between client and server?

~~~
jonpaul
I used my own code, as gwt-on-rails isn't maintained.

------
markstahler
I guess it's too much to ask that Google give up Eclipse and start supporting
the Oracle owned Netbeans instead.

~~~
bad_user
why would they do that?

