Future of GWT?

[Hayden Jones]

At the latest GoogleIO it was announced that the fate of GWT would be in the hands of a committee.

http://www.i-programmer.info/news/81-web-general/4459-gwt-swept-under-open-source.html 

What do people think of this change?  Will GWT survive without Google's direct stewardship?

Or is this just google trying to prevent Oracle from suing them over the core java apis or is GWT dying (I don't know if this is true or not) and google is abandoning it?

Opinions?

[Steel City Phantom]

i doubt its going to die any time soon, a majority of Google's systems are built on the GWT technology (gmail, maps, docs to name a few).  The word from the Vaadin team that is on the committee and works with Google closely on GWT is that Google basically wants to distribute the work load a little bit and they want much more community involvement and ideas on the project than there has been in the past.

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[Fabrizio Giudici]

On Wed, 01 Aug 2012 19:08:20 +0200, Steel City Phantom
<scph...@gmail.com> wrote:

> i doubt its going to die any time soon, a majority of Google's systems
> are
> built on the GWT technology (gmail, maps, docs to name a few). The word
> from the Vaadin team that is on the committee and works with
> Google closely on GWT is that Google basically wants to distribute the
> work
> load a little bit and they want much more community involvement and ideas
> on the project than there has been in the past.

Ditto. Generally speaking I agree that a strong leadership of an open
source project is often a good thing, but in this case it seems that the
leadership will be held - de facto - by a restricted committee of very
committed entities, which sounds good.


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Fabrizio Giudici - Java Architect, Project Manager
Tidalwave s.a.s. - "We make Java work. Everywhere."
fabrizio...@tidalwave.it
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[Christian Edward Gruber]

Nit: Actually, if you take a peek, G+ and Gmail and Docs are based on Google's Closure Libraries and the Closure (javascript) Compiler.  Lots of google systems use GWT, to be sure, but lots use native javascript.

Though GWT also uses the Closure Compiler if I recall correctly, so that can get a bit confusing.

Christian.

[Casper Bang]

Google Wave was indeed based on GWT, but none of the large known apps are GWT based AFAIK. When many of the original GWT devs were moved to Dart, and the development slowed down, I became cautious about recommending GWT for future development where I work. The latest news has me directly advising against it - I'd rather deal with the bare metal of CSS/HTML/JQuery which does not rely on browser development plugins etc.

[Fabrizio Giudici]

On Wed, 01 Aug 2012 22:17:23 +0200, Casper Bang <caspe...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> CSS/HTML/JQuery which does not rely on browser development plugins etc.

?? GWT is not based on a browser plugin.

[Casper Bang]

Comping any large GWT app takes forever, so developers rely on "development mode", where a plugin does the translation. In this day and age, with browsers updating once a month, it becomes a pretty irritating  exercise to locate or build compatible plugins (I've been developing with GWT, SmartGWT and GXT for 2 years now).

[Fabrizio Giudici]

On Wed, 01 Aug 2012 22:25:48 +0200, Casper Bang <caspe...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Comping any large GWT app takes forever, so developers rely on
> "development
> mode", where a plugin does the translation. In this day and age, with
> browsers updating once a month, it becomes a pretty irritating exercise
> to
> locate or build compatible plugins (I've been developing with GWT,
> SmartGWT
> and GXT for 2 years now).

This is not the only way. Vaadin uses pre-compiled GWT widgets and that
sooo long compilation never occurs, or occurs only once in a while when
using third parties' widgets. For the rest the development is super-fast
in 100% Java, no plugins, and, if you want, pretty agile. I've been
developing with GWT through Vaadin for 1.5 years now :-) Seeing that
Vaadin is sitting at the table of the new GWT stewards makes me feel
pretty safe.

[Casper Bang]

I don't know Vaadin, but I would argue that this issue concerns the official GWT development stack - which does indeed rely on the development mode and thus, a browser plugin. I am curious though, how can you hook into components and do your own (the nice thing about GWT is that one can use OO for reusability and extensionability), without having to compile these? 

[Fabrizio Giudici]

On Wed, 01 Aug 2012 22:43:30 +0200, Casper Bang <caspe...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> I don't know Vaadin, but I would argue that this issue concerns the
> official GWT development stack - which does indeed rely on the
> development
> mode and thus, a browser plugin

> I am curious though, how can you hook into
> components and do your own (the nice thing about GWT is that one can use
> OO
> for reusability and extensionability), without having to compile these?

You can't do everything with Vaadin that you do with GWT. Basically you
just use the pre-existing components, and if you want some extension you
fall back into the long compilation. But this still allows you to do many
things.

Back to the original point, a possible theory is that Google is tired of
Javascript, which wouldn't be a big surprise given their focus on Dart. So
they could be working to a replacement of GWT made with Dart that
overcomes the hassles of GWT development. In the meantime, people can
still use and develop with GWT since it's being handled by its community.
As a Vaadin developer I feel safe even in the long term, since if Dart is
succesfull I can foresee a new version of Vaadin using it and being
backward compatible. Just speculating, of course.

[Josh Berry]

On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 4:52 PM, Fabrizio Giudici
<Fabrizio...@tidalwave.it> wrote:
> Back to the original point, a possible theory is that Google is tired of
> Javascript, which wouldn't be a big surprise given their focus on Dart. So

Seems that they are actually not tired of javascript: http://angularjs.org/

I don't know the status of Dart. I thought that was the Atlanta crew,
which doesn't exist anymore. That not the case?

[Casper Bang]

Back to the original point, a possible theory is that Google is tired of  
Javascript, which wouldn't be a big surprise given their focus on Dart. So  
they could be working to a replacement of GWT made with Dart that  
overcomes the hassles of GWT development. In the meantime, people can  
still use and develop with GWT since it's being handled by its community.  

Well, except that Google is just replacing one cross-compiler with another - no less JavaScript, Chrome with native Dart support is still very much work in progress and it's unlikely that all browsers will gain native support the first couple of years. It makes a lot of sense for Google to abandon Java over Dart, and call me conservative, but I'm not not willing to bet in a community which swings left and right - I (or rather, the company I work for) require a minimum amount of standardization and official support, in order to guarantee their future livelihood.

[Fabrizio Giudici]

On Wed, 01 Aug 2012 23:00:35 +0200, Casper Bang <caspe...@gmail.com>
wrote:

>
>>

>> Back to the original point, a possible theory is that Google is tired of
>> Javascript, which wouldn't be a big surprise given their focus on Dart.
>> So
>>
>> they could be working to a replacement of GWT made with Dart that
>> overcomes the hassles of GWT development. In the meantime, people can
>> still use and develop with GWT since it's being handled by its
>> community.
>>
>>
>
> Well, except that Google is just replacing one cross-compiler with
> another
> - no less JavaScript, Chrome with native Dart support is still very much
> work in progress and it's unlikely that all browsers will gain native

Sure, we're talking of a perspective of a few years, not something that
happens next Fall.

> support the first couple of years.

The difference is that Dart, if I correctly recall, is not cross-compiled
but cross-interpreted to JavaScript. This means no long, multiple
cross-compilation, right?

And for what concerns other browsers, let's not forget that in the
meantime Chrome's market share is more or less on par with Internet
Explorer and well above Firefox. In a while they could be #1 and in future
they could have the chance of launching some Dart killer application, so
competition could *have* to add support for it. Again, just speculating.

[Steel City Phantom]

two weeks ago we started a huge (2 years of dev time) enterprise app using Vaadin (ie, gwt).  after talking to the Vaadin team, im not worried.  it is a VERY nice platform to work on, IMHO.  nearly all the GWT boiler plate code is eliminated by Vaadin and GWT only compiles when we make a change with our custom components, which are written in GWT.  It does feel great to be building a more or less true event driven UI again after years of trying various work around techniques with all other UI frameworks.  

We decided in our process that even if GWT hits end of life, it is functionality will take us well into the future.  but, as added insurance, we abstracted it out with Spring MVC just in case we had to change it out with something else 5+ years from now.

again, im not worried. 

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[Fabrizio Giudici]

On Thu, 02 Aug 2012 00:03:05 +0200, Steel City Phantom
<scph...@gmail.com> wrote:


> We decided in our process that even if GWT hits end of life, it is
> functionality will take us well into the future. but, as added
> insurance,
> we abstracted it out with Spring MVC just in case we had to change it out
> with something else 5+ years from now.

Same here.