Hello everyone, Sumit Chandel from the GWT team here.
I just wanted to clarify a couple of inaccuracies I've observed in this thread. Firstly, I don't believe that the choice to work from Java source instead of JVM bytecode was a bad decision. The team chose to work from Java source for all the reasons that Peter described above. For what GWT is trying to do, which is to produce highly optimized and lean JavaScript, it would be nonsensical to work from already optimized JVM bytecode and then attempt to reverse engineer the bytecode to then be able to infer enough information for optimization and then translate to JavaScript. Secondly, GWT is indeed an open source project that is being developed and maintained by a team of Google engineers. However, the team accepts hundreds of patches between releases that are contributed from the open source community. Compiler optimizations and bi-directional support for widgets in GWT 1.5 are examples of that. Also, we've had a number of successful open source developers take GWT and build their own open source projects from it, such as GWT-Ext, hibernate4gwt and so on. That said, it would be awesome to see a group of open source developers take on the challenge of generating highly-optimized JavaScript from the bytecode level, or even from source in another programming language. Also, if someone were to get a nice proof-of- concept working, the team would love to discuss it on the GWT Contributors forum and see where / how we could roll the idea and help with the effort if the community starts gaining interest. GWT Contributor Forum: http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Web-Toolkit-Contributors Cheers, -Sumit Chandel On Oct 21, 5:51 pm, Sal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I have to agree. In fact, I would say that there was no mistake at > all. > > On Oct 21, 12:59 pm, Peter Recore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > I don't think "mistake" is the right word there. I'm not an expert on > > Java Compilers and JVMs, but I'll go out on a limb here and risk > > embarrassing myself - my gut feeling is that Java is much easier to > > compile into javascript than random bytecode is. GWT makes aggressive > > optimizations based on information it can infer from java semantics. > > If GWT had to generalize to work with any possible bytecode, I doubt > > the resulting javascript could be as efficient. Part of GWT's appeal > > is that the end product is fast and lean javascript. While it would > > be nice if GWT could turn random x86 executable into blazingly fast > > javascript, I'm not going to criticize the GWT team because they > > haven't done so yet. If I'm wrong, and making GWT work with JVM is > > trivial to do, that's awesome! Submit the patch to the GWT team. The > > fact that no one has yet done so yet implies to me that this is not an > > easy thing to do, or else no one really wants to do it. In either > > case, it is not a mistake that it hasn't been done. > > > If you really like working in Scala, you could look into contributing > > to the project to compile Scala into Java, mentioned at the bottom of > > this page: http://www.scala-lang.org/faq/4 > > > If this post has a slightly sharp tone, it's because I don't like it > > when people criticize open source projects with vague complaints while > > at the same time asking for new features. > > > -peter > > > On Oct 21, 2:07 pm, Amir Michail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > Hi, > > > > Please support Java byte code so that we can use any languages that > > > work using the JVM such as Scala. > > > > GWT made a mistake in only supporting Java. I hope they correct it. > > > > Amir --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To post to this group, send email to google-appengine@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
