Google Products using GWT

[Kevin Anderson]

I realize that this question was asked in this thread, but seeing as the response was a few years old I thought I would pose the question again.

At work there has been a ton of discussion (putting it nicely) about the use of GWT inside the organization. It doesn't seem to be enough to those opposing the use of GWT to point out the several production applications running to the not so many "pure" javascript applications running. With the recent release of Google+ the topic has arisen again with those in the opposite camp pointing out that Google+ source appears to not be using any GWT. They are using this to argue that not even Google is using GWT to build their suite of products.

So, sorry for posing another question about this, but I would be curious about an updated list of Google products that use GWT.  Thanks.

[David Chandler]

Hi Kevin,

There are several hundred projects within Google using GWT and more are being written or rewritten all the time. Some of the major ones:

AdWords UI

AdSense UI

Blogger (http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/14/half-a-billion-blog-posts-later-google-to-give-blogger-a-revamp/)

Groups (new UI)

Doclist (the folders in docs, both desktop and mobile versions)

Parts of Maps / Geo

Follow us @googledevtools for more announcements still to come.

For a broader view of companies using GWT, have a look at the companies featured in this year's Developer Tool Sandbox at I/O (http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/sandbox.html#developer-tools) as well as the case studies posted on the GWT doc site (http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/casestudies/index.html). Also note that this forum continues to add members at the rate of ~500 / mo. GWT is still growing.

Also watch trunk on SVN. Googlers continue to improve GWT every day, and lots of the new features in the last year have been driven by Google projects (notably UIBinder, Activities and Places, and cell widgets).

The real question is whether GWT is a good fit for your project. We generally find that teams with strong Java experience writing rich, desktop-like apps benefit the most from GWT. Lots of people on this forum will tell you that if you start with pure JS and your code base grows, you'll soon reach a point where you wish you'd written in GWT. Don't kid yourself--there is a learning curve, especially for server-side developers not used to writing asynchronous, event-driven clients, but if your project is a good fit, you won't look back.

/dmc

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[Thomas Broyer]

Well, the new Google Groups uses GWT, to begin with ;-) https://groups.google.com/forum

Buzz makes use of GWT (the popup for finding people/seeing who you follow/who follows some is built with GWT). I believe Orkut switched to GWT a while ago, and Orkut team members (if I'm not mistaken) have been contributing a lot to GWT recently (so despite Google+ being made with Closure, there might be something "social" coming, built with GWT), and of course Google Moderator and Google Document Reader.

More recently, two new product versions have been unveiled that are built with GWT: the new Google Web Fonts http://www.google.com/webfonts/v2 and the Apps Script GUI Builder.

And given that hard work from the GWT team (with the help from other teams), I bet there are other (major) projects being built with GWT at Google.

[Bala Sankar]

GWT is the best for developing enterprise applications for any mobile platform.
It works on iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows Mobile too.
Emerging SOA Architecture is, thin client with GWT + Request Builder connects to server side residing in Cloud.

Regards,
Bala.
Author: Book. Web On-The-Go.
http://books.google.com/books/about/Web_On_The_Go.html?id=jxSy2XKTqqcC

[Yannis BRES]

Hi David !

Would you (or Thomas ? ;-) ) have any shareable insights as to why Google+ seems to be coded in pure Java / closure instead of GWT ?

Best regards,
     Yannis

[Dan]

I am interested to know what Google+ is written in too. What leads you
to believe it is Java / closure?

[Thomas Broyer]

On Saturday, July 2, 2011 1:24:42 PM UTC+2, Dan wrote:

I am interested to know what Google+ is written in too. What leads you
to believe it is Java / closure?

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2717174 

[Yannis Bres]

What leads you to believe it is Java / closure?

Grmpf !  I meant pure JavaScript not Java !  I hope that the rest of the sentence helped you to auto-correct...  ;-)

Having a look at the web page sources and inspecting the DOM contents quickly rules out GWT, at least as a core framework (probably too much inlined JS, unfamiliar iframe IDs, odd inlined JSON, etc.).
Closure was just an educated guess based upon the well known affinity of Google (you bet) for this compiler / framework, and the blogosphere & co quickly flourished with similar suspicions towards this (and now we have "official statements" such as the one Thomas pointed out).
Looking at element IDs also seemed to rule out GWT as a "component generator", although this could be an artifact of closure.

Best regards,
     Yannis

[Dan]

Thanks makes sense. The Java bit throw me :)

[David Chandler]

Fundamentally, it's because engineering teams at Google are free to choose their own tools. The Architecture Police don't work here. There are many instances where Google tools or products compete with each other like GWT and Closure. In Google culture, that's generally viewed as healthy as it allows freedom of choice and provides incentive for competing frameworks to continually improve.

As for Google+, I don't know any specifics, but lots of factors typically come into play as with any company: the team's skillset and preferences, whether the app is in framework X's sweet spot, etc. I don't understand it personally, but some people really like JS, and Google has a lot of (very good) JS developers.

/dmc

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[Bala Sankar]

Market for GWT Apps.

Android and iPhone apps have market. Developers build applications and sell their apps.
Chrome and other tablets will extensively rely on GWT apps.
How do GWT developers get rewards?

Regards,
Bala

[Karthik Reddy]

Just did a cursory inspection of the new "Google Offers" application and it looks like an application built using GWT. 

https://www.google.com/offers/home

[Yannis Bres]

FTR, see also a (just started) list of references on the official GWT
blog : http://googlewebtoolkit.blogspot.com/2011/07/gwt-spotlight-berger-levrault.html
& following.
Best regards,
          Yannis