What's the current state of GWT? [closed]

Question

I am currently working on a complex web application and am finding javascript/jquery development for the certain things to be very challenging. So I started looking for alternative tools.

I think GWT is probably what I've been looking for. There has been numerous times during development that I have thought "if only I was programming in Java." The features I'm wanting mostly revolve around OOP and re-usability that I find difficult to obtain in javascript.

However, I want to get a feeling of how viable GWT is. I've done some searching and have read some opinions of how GWT was a year ago. But am curious how things are going now. Are many developers using it? Is it growing? Do you see GWT being used years from now?

Answer 1

GWT is definitely growing, within Google products to begin with.

• Google Buzz makes use of GWT, as does Google Moderator,
• the new Google Web Fonts v2 is built with GWT.
• There are people from the Orkut team contributing extensively these past weeks to the GWT code base (let UiBinder generate a single big HTML string and then wrap "rendered" subtrees into widgets).
• The new Google Groups is built with GWT.
• They're launching RequestFactory as a mean of sharing the same protocol, and even the same code between your web app (in GWT) and your mobile app (for Android).
• Rovio launched Angry Birds Chrome last May, thanks to GWT and ForPlay (which makes the same code base in Java compilable to "HTML5", Flash, Java and Android!).
• Apache Wave (successor of Google Wave) still uses GWT for its UI.
• etc.

You can also look at the growth in number of project members over time thanks to the Wayback Machine. Compare January 2007 with August 2009, and now. Ohloh also has some good figures.

Answer 2

I'd say it's definitely picking up especially with Chromebooks and other web-based systems driving the need for HTML5 apps. Even the new port of Angry Birds to chrome is using GWT:

http://chrome.angrybirds.com/

Evidence:

http://r2045.project-slingshot-hr.appspot.com/fowl/fowl.nocache.js