Is GWT still an option for a large business application [closed]

Asked 21/4, 2011 at 13:30 Answered 3/5, 2013 at 16:37

My company is planning on developing a brand new web front-end application.

Some background:

It must "sizzle" i.e. a nice marketable look and feel.
Our development team has no Java experience, with limited experience in Silverlight, Javascript, JQuery or CSS.
Time to market is a factor.
We need to stream large amounts of data from an Oracle database.
It must support 500 - 1000 concurrent users
It will be hosted internally behind a firewall.
We need mapping (geo-spatial) capabilities.

Someone has recommended using GWT instead of Silverlight or Traditional technologies(Javascript, jquery, CSS etc.).

I am not sure if this is the right way to go? A lot of the GWT news is from 2007/2008. It makes me think that this technology is old and maybe dying.

If you had a choice would you choose GWT?

Alboran answered 21/4, 2011 at 13:30 Comment(2)

See also: #745015 – Cara 25/4, 2011 at 14:14

5. If GWT is for the client side of the app, there there's no relevance. – Mandal 4/5, 2013 at 4:37

unfortunately two of your statements are mutually exclusive in this context:

Our development team has no Java experience
Time to market is a factor

I'm a Java programmer who has picked up GWT over the last year or so. It's immensely effective being able to write direct to the browser using a compiled language & mature development tools. I can fly through web-development faster than ever before (using ASP, JSP, ExtJS ...).

But, as the other commenters have said: if you've no Java experience you're going to find it a real challenge picking up both technologies (Java & GWT) in a short time. If you do manage to make it to market in a reasonable time I could only imagine the code base would be in very poor condition (since you'd be learning as you go) - which would be a very poor foundation for your organisation's shiny new venture.

There again, you don't have a 'lot' of skills in the other related skills you listed either.

I suspect there's a more effective solution. As some wise old goat project manager said:

I have three variables to delivering your project: time, cost and quality. Pick any two

In your situation, if the organisation wants a quality product in a short time, it's the cost factor that must compensate - your organisation should buy in some interim GWT expertise to give you a sound software architecture and to mentor your team for the next few months. After that you'll be ready to take the reigns, inheriting a quality codebase by 'standing on the shoulders of giants'.

Impressure answered 21/4, 2011 at 14:31 Comment(2)

Thanks ianmyo! and everyone else... At least I now know it's a viable option. – Alboran 22/4, 2011 at 12:46

Nice answer ... thanks for your edit on my answer ;-) – Remaremain 7/12, 2018 at 14:2

As others have said, GWT definitely is not a dying project. Quite the contrary actually as there are now more than 20 regular contributors from within Google (versus a semi-dozen back in 2008). Wave (despite being discontinued as a Google service, it's still alive as an Apache Foundation project), Orkut, AdWords, Google Moderator and the new (still beta) Google Groups are made with GWT; and parts of Google Buzz and a few other projects at Google are built with it too.

Now as to your choice:

Silverlight is a dying technology. Microsoft made it clear that it now invests in "HTML5": http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-our-strategy-with-silverlight-has-shifted/7834
GWT is mostly a client-side toolkit, but it comes with "high productivity" tools for client-server communications (GWT-RPC and RequestFactory for end-to-end protocols, AutoBeans for easy JSON serialization). With UiBinder, you can easily put to use your web designer skills.
if you're comfortable with JS, then go for it, but then you'd have to choose the "right toolkit" (jQuery? Google Closure?). Otherwise (which seems to be the case), it really depends how much "ajaxy" you need/want to be. I'm a strong believer in "one-page apps", but YMMV, or you can have specific constraints that rule it out. In any case, you'd have to choose a server-side technology.

So, depending on your needs/wants and skills, I'd choose GWT or "some JS toolkit". In any case, you'll have full control over the look and feel (unless you choose one of the bloated players: ExtJS/ExtGWT, SmartGWT or similar; you'll probably have a shorter time-to-market with these, but you'll pay it later, in terms of performance, integration with other toolkits, and look-and-feel).

In the light of what you're saying about your skills, I would definitely recommend GWT (despite your lack of experience with Java); because lack of experience with JavaScript is far worse than lack of experience with Java (you're talking about a "large application", so it's really important to start building things right and/or have tools to help refactoring, which you'll have with Java).

@ianmayo replied while I was writing the above, and I can only second what he said!

Horsepowerhour answered 21/4, 2011 at 14:40 Comment(0)

GWT is definitely not old or dying! A lot of Google's own applications are developed using GWT. You can download the GBST case study and learn how the global financial company uses GWT to improve productivity and create a rich user experience. You have to know that when you use GWT you automatically use javascript, html, etc. You create a your gwt application in java, but when you compile it gwt creates a folder with html files, javascript code, css, etc...

I definitely recommend it!

Penurious answered 21/4, 2011 at 13:57 Comment(3)

"A lot of Google's own applications are developed using GWT" ~ Yes I have seen that being said, what I've not seen is actual examples. Google Wave is mentioned, but that's been dropped. Thanks I'll have a look at the case study you mention. – Alboran 22/4, 2011 at 12:42

I'm not sure of any applications but I do know that Java is the most used programming language by Google. So this means something... – Penurious 22/4, 2011 at 12:47

The new Google Analytics UI is implemented in GWT. The transition to GWT is described by the Project Lead in a Google IO video on YouTube. – Impressure 23/4, 2011 at 5:25

In order not to mislead readers with above seemingly unanimous answers, keep objective view in respected stackoverflow, following review expressed exact experiences I had with using GWT. Whether GWT is dying depends on how many new apps will adopt it,Google trend can tell (gwt trend).

Excerpt from https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/38441/when-not-to-use-google-web-toolkit

> I am both good and bad to answer this question - good, in that I've actually used it before, and bad, in that I was quite experienced with HTML/CSS/JavaScript prior to working with GWT. This left me maddened by using GWT in a way that other Java developers who don't really know DHTML may not have been.

GWT does what it says - it abstracts JavaScript and to some degree HTML into Java. To many developers, this sounds brilliant. However, we know, as Jeff Atwood puts it, all abstractions are failed abstractions (worth a read if considering GWT). With GWT, this specifically introduces the following problems:

Using HTML in GWT sucks.

As I said it, to some degree, even abstracts away HTML. It sounds good to a Java developer. But it's not. HTML is a document markup format. If you wanted to create Java objects to define a document, you would not use document markup elements. It is maddeningly verbose. It is also not controlled enough. In HTML there is essentially one way to write

<p>Hello how are <b>you</b>?</p>

In GWT, you have 3 child nodes (text, B, text) attached to a P node. You can either create the P first, or create the child nodes first. One of the child nodes might be the return result of a function. After a few months of development with many developers, trying to decipher what your HTML document looks like by tracing your GWT code is a headache-inducing process.

In the end, the team decided that maybe using HTMLPanel for all HTML was the right way to go. Now, you've lost many of GWT's advantages of having elements readily available to Java code to bind easily for data.

Using CSS in GWT sucks.

By attachment to HTML abstraction, this means that the way you have to use CSS is also different. It might have improved since I last used GWT (about 9 months ago), but at the time, CSS support was a mess. Because of the way GWT makes you create HTML, you often have levels of nodes that you didn't know were injected (any CSS dev knows how this can dramatically affect rendering). There were too many ways to embed or link CSS, resulting in a confusing mess of namespaces. On top of that you had the sprite support, which again sounds nice, but actually mutated your CSS and we had problems with it writing properties which we then had to explicitly overwrite later, or in some cases, thwarted our attempts to match our hand-coded CSS and having to just redesign it in ways that GWT didn't screw it up.

Union of problems, intersection of benefits

Any languages is going to have it's own set of problems and benefits. Whether you use it is a weighted formula based on those. When you have an abstraction, what you get is a union of all the problems, and an intersection of the benefits. JavaScript has it's problems, and is commonly derided among server-side engineers, but it also has quite a few features that are helpful for rapid web development. Think closures, syntax shorthand, ad-hoc objects, all of the stuff done by Jquery (like DOM querying by CSS selector). Now forget about using it in GWT!

Separation of concerns

We all know that as the size of a project grows, having good separation of concerns is critical. One of the most important is the separation between display and processing. GWT made this really hard. Probably not impossible, but the team I was on never came up with a good solution, and even when we thought we had, we always had one leaking into the other.

Desktop != Web

As @Berin Loritsch posted in the comments, the model or mindset GWT is built for is living applications, where a program has a living display tightly coupled with a processing engine. This sounds good because that's what so many feel the web is lacking. But there are two problems: A) The web is built on HTTP and this is inherently different. As I mentioned above, the technologies built on HTTP - HTML, CSS, even resource-loading and caching (images, etc.), have been built for that platform. B) Java developers who have been working on the web do not easily switch to this desktop-application mindset. Architecture in this world is an entirely different discipline. Flex developers would probably be more suited to GWT than Java web developers.

In conclusion... GWT is capable of producing quick-and-dirty AJAX applications quite easily using just Java. If quick-and-dirty doesn't sound like what you want, don't use it. The company I was working for was a company that cared a lot about the end product, and it's sense of polish, both visual and interactive, to the user. For us front-end developers, this meant that we needed to control HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in ways that made using GWT like trying to play the piano with boxing gloves on

Citron answered 13/7, 2012 at 20:17 Comment(2)

Using HTML in GWT sucks. UI Binder in GWT means you can design your UI in HTML and utilise objects for the elements. – Illaudable 11/10, 2012 at 22:55

The quotee's experience is from early 2010, before UiBinder in GWT 2.0. UiBinder solved the "HTML/CSS in GWT sucks" and effected the separation of concerns between UI and logic. – Riplex 22/7, 2013 at 5:9

First of all , GWT is not dying technology, its usage increases, and its latest version is 2.2. I am using GWT for 2 years, since version 1.6. Its improvements since them is quite amazing.

Since GWT is client side technology, it does have only positive effects of your application scaliblity feature. Because server side web technologies such as jsf, struts, wicket are server resource consumers, but gwt does not need any server resource to render user interface..

But there is problem for your team. Because your team has no java experience, it would be quite difficult to adapt yourself two new technologies java and gwt.. If you have time to learn , I would strongly suggest GWT.

Helminthic answered 21/4, 2011 at 13:57 Comment(0)

It takes approx 1 year to become proficient in GWT. Using GWT pays off if you develop an application as sophisticated as MicrosoftOffice or PhotoShop. It makes no sense to use GWT for small and relatively simple apps, IMHO. GWT is a time killing framework indeed, and you have to have very strong reasons to use it. I think that 99% of web apps don't need GWT.

Dominion answered 3/5, 2013 at 16:37 Comment(1)

This probably sums it up. – Riplex 22/7, 2013 at 5:16

-1

GWT is not dying framework, but time killing framework. It has security issue. You can do easily CSRF(Cross site request forgery) request to the GWT applications. Also Java and Javascript are totally different languages, you can't translate easily. For your productivity avoid GWT.

Sulcate answered 10/1, 2012 at 16:29 Comment(1)

I guess you have to read up on XSRF to learn that any website is potentially vulnerable unless you keep good practice. No different for GWT, but at least pointed out and encouraged. – Stearns 10/1, 2012 at 20:1

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