Should I use Google Web Toolkit for my new webapp?

Question

I would like to create a database backed interactive AJAX webapp which has a custom (specific kind of events, editing) calendaring system. This would involve quite a lot of JavaScript and AJAX, and I thought about Google Web Toolkit for the interface and Ruby on Rails for server side.

Is Google Web Toolkit reliable and good? What hidden risks might be if I choose Google Web Toolkit? Can one easily combine it with Ruby on Rails on server side? Or should I try to use directly a JavaScript library like jQuery?

I have no experience in web development except some HTML, but I am an experienced programmer (c++, java, c#), and I would like to use only free tools for this project.

Answer 1

RoR is actually one of the things the GWT is made to work well with, as long as you're using REST properly. It's in the Google Web Toolkit Applications book, and you can see a demo from the book using this kind of idea here. That's not to say that you won't have any problems, but I think the support is definitely out there for it.

There's a neat project for making RoR/GWT easy that you can find here (MIT license). I haven't had a chance to try it out yet, but it looks like a good amount of thought has been put into it. One catch is that it looks like it hasn't been fully tested with 2.1 Rails yet, just 2.0, so you may run into a few (probably minor and fixable) errors.