GWT Future plan

Question

We have multiple product developed primarily using GWT and currently used by our end customers.

Wanted to know the road map of GWT. I got some unofficial update that google is moving there product which is developed in GWT to some other new technology. Is it true?

What is long term plan for GWT and also we haven't seen any new release from past one year. Any suggestions ?

Divagate

migrate your product to a micro frontend architecture as described here medium.com/@tomsoderlund/…, so you can replace parts step by step – Consistency

J2CL get public today: groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/google-web-toolkit/S2pk48j75IU. Several modules and frameworks have already prepared to work with J2CL. Besides that, GWT 2.x will be maintained. There are also a lot of updates in the GWT branch. Think, we will see a GWT update. So, no worry. – Backlash

and, to get a better answer: ask you question here: gitter.im/gwtproject/gwt – Backlash

Thanks all for your prompt response.. but i want to know the future plans for GWT. is it Dead ?If so, how it will support newer versions of browser? – Divagate

You can ask that question about any framework. I have seen tons of frameworks come and go... The most popular framework today may be obsolete in 5 years time. I have seen this happen more than once. No one knows the future. – Kight

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because SO is not Google customer support or aware of their product planning. This is not a programming question. – Ostap

I suggest to move to webstandards for any commercial product. Reduce as much as you can the number of libs. – Nigel

for all the users here, do read this blog when you get some free time - hackernoon.com/why-angular-made-me-quit-web-dev-f63b83a157af – Allocate

Answer 1

In my opinion the GWT project is dead. The last stable version was released on Oct 19, 2017. As opposed to the other answer I would like to point out that the Google Trends score is relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. Since we are particularly interested in the long term chart it doesn't make sense to analyze the short time chart.

Let's instead have a look at the long term trends. The chart pretty much says it all - the project is facing a massive decline:

• Stackoverflow Trends

• Google Trends

This is what increased interest would look like:

• Example: Google Trends for Angular

Groundless

Answer 2

I have worked over GWT and GXT for some time now, and as a developer I can say that - GWT/GXT based application are fast for UI development once the layout is done , and they are easy to debug also, there are so many libraries available - which are compatible with gwt and are free also , well there may not be that much of future release in gwt/gxt - but i think the versions of gwt/gxt which are available are powerful enough to develop a complete web application easily.

By the google trends , what I have got for GWT is as below -

and for GXT

If you see the trend for GWT and GXT near by end of 2018 - it has been increased a bit

If you dig into stack-overflow - you will get ton of questions and response around GWT and GXT

GWT questions

GXT questions

so i think - if you have team of good developers - who already have knowledge on GWT / GXT - you can go ahead -

All the best :)

As a I was always fond of GWT - i kept following for updates in between and here you go, new release of GWT is here

[GWT release-notes][5]

2.10.0 June 9, 2022

Allocate

Answer 3

We are using GWT in an embedded product for some years now with a small team of developers and I find it a plus that GWT is not rapidly developing, opposed to Angular. I am not so familiar with Angular (some other teams are using it), but what I hear from colleagues is that just maintaining the status quo (i.e. having all libraries reasonably up to date) is in it self a lot of work. We do not have the resources for this kind of software maintenance.

How are others experiences on this, has anyone moved from GWT to Angular with a small team and how are the experiences (from a resource point of view) to that?

Deciliter

Answer 4

It is 2020. I don't know whether someone is still looking for an answer to this question.

At this point of time, GWT is not a prudent decision for any new project. There are 2 primary reasons.

1. Google tries to distant itself from Java as far as it can. Google prefers Kotlin over Java in Android.

   2.Angular is far superior in every way. It provides type safety. and closely related to JavaScript. Any JavaScript code is a really typescript code. So the libraries that were created for JavaScript over the decade works seamlessly with Angular.

Virga

Thanks Raj for your response..i can see GWT has release 2.9.0 in may 2020 – Divagate

@mohammedsameen Google teams are normally compete with each others. We can see Android/Java, Android/Kotlin and Flutter for mobile developments. For GWT, It may not be sustainable in near future, as most of the enterprise moves towards Angular. If we look closely the core Idea of Angular and GWT, they are same. But the great advantage for Angular, it has native support to Javascript (every javascript is a valid typescript code). – Virga

Point 1 and 2 is invalid. The j2cl (java to javascript compiler) project indicates that google is still interested in using Java for web development. For Androids API documentation, Java is the default option.. The choice to support Kotlin was probably made when the language increased in popularity. Angular is NOT superior. Both frameworks have type safety and libraries, GWTs compiler does a good job in helping you point out problems.. – Busra

Answer 5

This is not a direct answer. Just thinking aloud.. perhaps..

But I've seen Vaadin (vaadin.com) using GWT (gwtproject.org) in the past and now changing to Polymer (polymer-project.org) in the recent years.

Can't deny the value GWT brings in through type-safety. So the question perhaps can rephrase to what alternatives developers have without re-writing the whole solution to support a new model/paradigm of a completely new framework.

If there is a way to overcome the slow compilation on GWT, it's still a great idea and a product, and will be for a long time. So worth finding an answer to the question I believe.. ??

Having said that, I wonder if Google still use GWT for Gmail and AdWords? :-) (Or the new interfaces meaning they've already crossed to the Polymer world!

Targett

Answer 6

We have a medium size project based on GWT in our company; It's a mature software, with more than 100,000 users and has performed well so far. However, GWT technology seems to become obsolete and I personally see no bright future for it, in competition with brand-new client-side rivals such as Angular. GWT had another minor release (2.9.0) several months ago, but it does not mean that project is still active and promising. I have had a relatively good experience using GWT so far and our clients get used to it as well, but the problem is that you might wake up someday and find out that a new version of Chrome or Firefox is released that no longer supports GWT mutations. Knowing that we gradually started migrating our client code to Angular which is of course very similar to GWT in the soul (Both are complete UI Frameworks; GWT transforms java to JS, while Angular does the same with TypeScript; both projects are supported by Google, and there are lots of widgets for both available out there).
I suggest that, despite all its costs, moving from GWT to another more up-to-date technology is inevitable and crucial IF the remaining of your software's lifetime is more than one or two years.

Accusatorial

Answer 7

There has been a new GWT release version 2.9.0 on 2020-05-13.

For GXT (currently at version 4.0.3 from 2018-03-16), vendor Sencha just announced an early adopter commercial release 4.0.4 in either Q3 or Q4 of 2020, but that release is probably only working with GWT 2.8.2. Unfortunately there's no public roadmap from Sencha to support GWT 2.9.0 yet.

Ahmadahmar