Comment by gthank | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gthank | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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...)

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...). You should probably also mention that you don't need to recompile in development mode.

Some of these criticisms are also true of all of the browser-side application frameworks - i.e SproutCore, Cappuccino etc.

FWIW, the compile time is still pretty long even with one compile permutation - and even while developing there is sometimes a need do do this (for example, changes to serialized objects.)

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.

Regarding compile times, a few things I've found that help:

1) Reduce the number of targets (even if only while you are doing development) 2) Increase the number of threads doing the GWT compiling (-localWorkers).

Also, try running your compiles from a SSD. I haven't done this, but I've heard really good things about it (and GWT compiling sure is IO intensive so it's not surprising)

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