JsInterop wrapping of D3 js

[Tim Macpherson]

There was one but d3 requires following the js samples.

I am having to use typescript to make sense of my extensive D3 js code. 

I'm now thinking seems like TS is coercing  new writers of js to write more like Java because the old style 'duck typing' chaining methods can't be typed by TS

(written on phone, sorry about typos)

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[Vassilis Virvilis]

I have a ~750 LOC file that maps the subset my application uses of an older version (3.5.x) of D3 to jsinterop.

I managed to write Java in a very javascript way with this. Chaining was also working. If you return a Selection object everything works as expected. Transforming the JS examples was very straightforward with minimal changes.

I have even filed a bug report when I had hit GWT limitations... https://github.com/gwtproject/gwt/issues/9675

I always wanted to clean it up, update it to the latest D3 and post it as OpenSource in Github but I never found the time...

    Vassilis

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Vassilis Virvilis

[Tim Macpherson]

For you the chaining patterns are ok in  java ? I have several thousand lines of D3 js code, all written in Java patterns with little chaining. Converting it to TS is tedious but every step makes the codebase easier in the ide.
AI told me the d3 lib by Bostock can't be  in TS if anyone wants to edit it, we just get TS types from it

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[Vassilis Virvilis]

To be honest not really no.

I didn't like the chaining pattern when I saw it initially. If there was a jfreechart (https://www.jfree.org/jfreechart/) like library back then I would use it. Now it looks like there is one: https://github.com/jfree/jsfreechart Wow!

But...

D3 is built around the selection object - exactly like jQuery. This presents some interesting capabilities.

For example you can have a big table and D3 will read the data from there. There is no need to duplicate the data, to sync them etc.

Furthermore the possibility to transform any random js example on the web in GWT java quickly, was a productivity boost.

That approach really paid off also for debugging. Consider the following case. D3 java does not work. What's the problem? Is it the bindings? Let's create a small example in js and run it natively. If it works it's the binding's fault. If it doesn't work then it is the way we use D3 or worse a D3 bug.

So I believe it was a pragmatic approach. We could use D3 docs, D3 examples etc.

Hope that helps.

   Vassilis

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Vassilis Virvilis

[Tim Macpherson]

off subject for the group maybe, I have to use d3 in TS for  new projects,  no problem just wondering why the d3 lib is not released in TS ? because it's impossible to type probably, too old fashioned js.

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On Thu, Dec 4, 2025 at 8:22 PM, Vassilis Virvilis

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[Tim Macpherson]

Question  possibly of interest is how GWT stands against Typescript which seems to be now established as a  front end standard. 

Observations so far: 

1) refactoring in vscode with TS built in or eclipse with the TS plugin: is very poor compared to GWT in eclipse. 

2) Typing in TS ... 

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On Thu, Dec 4, 2025 at 8:41 PM, 'Tim Macpherson' via GWT Users

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[RobW]

Question  possibly of interest is how GWT stands against Typescript which seems to be now established as a  front end standard. 

I'm really not sure why Typescript is relevant - if I were coding front-end in JS or TS, then yes I'd think about which syntax and features (type checking etc) were better. But in GWT I'm coding in Java. I don't really care what the compiles down to as long as it works. OK, when debugging I do see the JS output, but I'm never mod'ing that directly. On occasion, to use a lib, I'll quickly craft some JSNI bindings for the methods I need. But that's as close as I go to the JS layer. 

[Tim Macpherson]

I'm using GWT and TS together, both involve static typing and ide support around that. Basic question is: does anyone else do this (I assume yes) and how do they compare?

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[Craig Mitchell]

I'm not sure I understand the question.  I've used TS in one project, and GWT in another.  Never in the same project.  As far as static typing goes, Java (GWT) wins hands down, as it is a native to the language.

[Tim Macpherson]

As a  GWT user also using TS when necessary:
refactoring: WWD in eclipse for TS,  vs  VScode, no noticeable difference  ? essentially nothing useful in either ?
Typing - all must be done manually, syntax is  back to front: name then type.

Why did Google drop GWT for it to be superceded by this?
About the same time they were trying to launch Dart but that went nowhere afaik

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[Craig Mitchell]

Re: Why did Google drop GWT for it to be superceded by this?

My 2 cents worth of guessing is that because GWT protects developers from learning all about JS, developers might not get the most out of JS.  Eg: A Java developer sees no issue using integers, but JS doesn't support them, so GWT adds complexity in JS to simulate them.  Companies that want the bleeding edge performance might not like this.

But, as I said, I'm only guessing here, I've never worked at Google.

[Colin Alworth]

It is probably worth noting that while Google did drop GWT the compiler and runtime, they continue to ship GWT's JRE emulation in Google Sheets and Gmail (via J2CL and Closure Compiler) in decently large JS files, with a lot of other code that plausibly looks like it shares (1000+ classes each). Java's distinctive Object.toString() behavior makes it pretty easy to find in compiled JS. As Google has described in the past, this lets them write the core runtime for an app in a single language, Java, and translate to build the UI in the most appropriate language for the platform they are deploying to.

I'm not aware of many GWT apps that are being used like that, but there are some. For one of them, we built and open sourced https://github.com/Vertispan/jsinterop-ts-defs/ to do the opposite of what you're discussing with d3.js - take Java types with some JsInterop annotations, and generate .d.ts files from them. This way, JS/TS developers can import those types and get rich type information about the Java we compiled to JS. There are a few custom annotations that we've found helpful to add on, but for the most part this tool works with any GWT app using JsInterop to expose some classes/functions as a library.

I don't think that is what Google is doing - mostly because they've historically resisted efforts to generate externs from JsInterop, preferring to read Closure-annotated JS and generate Java from it. It has worked well for us though, as there aren't a lot of JS/TS projects outside of Google that are suitable to being passed through Closure on their way to production.

[Tim Macpherson]

Another factor was emegence of angular then react, which are incompatible with GWT but considered essential by Google at that time ? 

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[Colin Alworth]

I'd need you to define "incompatible" for this discussion to make sense - the GWT library I described above is used by a (much larger) React app, and I know of several other apps with react+gwt integration (including GWT/Java tooling which lets you build react components in Java). There certainly can be paradigm problems in taking a GWT app and shoving React code into it or vice versa, but the same can be said for taking a plain JS app and adding React, etc - and no one ever says that React is incompatible with JS (though it certainly suggests a particular style of JS).

[Tim Macpherson]

, I gather the Google move re gwt was related to angular and maybe react in some way ?  Incompatible probably wrong term.

I know D3 is incompatible with react, it has optimal rendering and shadow dom would only confuse things. That's a different issue.

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[David Nouls]

From what I remember, Google stopped GWT during the time of the conflict between SUN and Microsoft. They had litigation going on around the Java support in IE. I always was under the impression that Google was trying to protect themselves against SUN for the same reason.

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[Tim Macpherson]

That's why they created Dart

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[Thomas Broyer]

On Wednesday, December 10, 2025 at 9:09:13 PM UTC+1 David Nouls wrote:

From what I remember, Google stopped GWT during the time of the conflict between SUN and Microsoft. They had litigation going on around the Java support in IE. I always was under the impression that Google was trying to protect themselves against SUN for the same reason.

Why would they have developed J2Cl then? It doesn't make sense.

My recollection is that the people doing frontend work knew JS and CSS and Closure and didn't want to change (and it was probably a bit hard to hire for GWT), so the goal was to translate Java to JS to produce a JS lib, with Closure typing, for use with their existing pipeline. They initially tried to add it to GWT proper (IIRC that's how they did it in Inbox at the time), but it wasn't conclusive.

Also, their frontend pipeline for Closure is full of optimizations around updates, where browsers only download a "diff" of what changed since the version they had in cache. GWT is duplicating many of those things that they already had, and probably isn't as good. Also the fact that GWT is kind of a "monolithic" build pipeline.