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

Question

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

Some background:

1. It must "sizzle" i.e. a nice marketable look and feel.
2. Our development team has no Java experience, with limited experience in Silverlight, Javascript, JQuery or CSS.
3. Time to market is a factor.
4. We need to stream large amounts of data from an Oracle database.
5. It must support 500 - 1000 concurrent users
6. It will be hosted internally behind a firewall.
7. 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?

Answer 1

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'.