GWT for big projects?

Question

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?

Gastrolith

I'd suggest you check on #3949544 to see some real world projects (some of them are quite big...). – Dextroglucose

What do you mean by reliable? Because when I think of reliability I think of if gwt-rpc is expected to perform correctly over a period of time to which the answer is yes but isn't specific for big projects. If your interested in server load, GWT will be very unlikely your problem area, but the scalability of your backend/server. To summarize: yes GWT is suitable for big projects. – Fruitless

@Hilbrand I wonder if GWT performs correctly in big projects. What do you think if wikipedia implemented in GWT ? – Gastrolith

GWT works fine for big projects. See Google Wave and Seesmic web. The higher the user interaction, the more it's useful to use GWT. Also if you have many updates on specific areas on a single page GWT is perfect. Wikipedia is big, but big in data, most users use it very static, like any information site. So for this part of the site GWT is less suited, also take into account that GWT is not/less crawable by search engines. For the admin/management part of a site like Wikipedia GWT would be a perfect. – Fruitless

Answer 1

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.

Michiko

Answer 2

Your examples (youtube, twitter, wikipedia) are not good candidates for GWT, so if you're building that type of application you'll probably want to stick to traditional server based frameworks like SpringMVC or Spring Roo.

GWT is better suited for applications that would traditionally be desktop based and need to do a lot of processing on the client side such as email clients, games, reporting apps, word processors, etc...

Lifeless

Answer 3

I want to point out that "in big projects if generated javascript codes is larger and larger, User is obligated to wait to download js file before to use web site."

Rociorock

That's why you should use code splitting, so the initial load is small and additional functionality is loaded when needed. This is especially important for big applications. – Fruitless

@Hilbrand yes additional functionality is loaded when it is need. However, I want to draw your attention to the gwt-rpc mechanism and it's design pattern that is it(gwt) suitable for "heavy" projects I mean lots of transaction – Gastrolith

Why do you think that GWT-RPC may not be suitable for heavy projects? You may want to consider using RequestFactory code.google.com/webtoolkit/doc/trunk/… – Untitled