[PJUG Javamail] GWT

[Michael Van Kleeck]

My current company has a GWT UI that we're maintaining and extending to add new features. I previously have worked on two other GWT UI's that we built from scratch at other clients. My experience is that GWT is great for building new UI's, but it's not particularly maintainable or extensible. I went through the ordeal of trying to add a single menu item to the existing UI yesterday, and it took about 3 hours of config file modifications, code generation, and working with the GWT compiler to figure out just what all was needed to get a new item in the existing UI. (resource files, UI binders, CSS with names that bind to names in Java files, etc...)

And GWT doesn't solve the eternal IE 7/8 compatibility issues for UI's, despite the write-once, run anywhere promises (oh, Java...). Trying to clean up GWT-generated Javascript for IE- that's weekends of support fun!

More recent versions of GWT might solve some of these issues- our UI is built on some version of GWT 1. 

If I were building a new UI today, from scratch, I'd probably go with jQuery or some other Javascript libraries calling into a service layer. Javascript is quick to write and easy to throw away when product teams decide they need new features or a new UI. GWT's complexity makes it fine for developing long-lived applications, but modern UI's are fairly disposable, and GWT is just too complex for rapid release cycles, IMHO.

-Michael