Keep in mind at Google, we write lots of large Web projects, and even the ones that are pure JS (G+, Gmail, Docs, Maps, etc) use Closure Compiler and lots of typing. We find it invaluable.
But the world is going mobile, and going forward, you need to support Android, iOS, and Web, and you need to be flexible and not box yourself in. You have a few choices to do this: 1) Try to deploy mobile Web everywhere. 2) Go with something like React-native 3) Rewrite all 3 clients 3 times in 3 languages 4) Try to share code as much as possible between platforms. We have decided to go with option #4 for some projects. For example, the next-generation Gmail (Inbox), Google Spreadsheets, and others. We share 80% of our code with all platforms. J2Cl will join J2ObjC is providing an aligned solution for Hybrid apps. This may not fit everyone's needs, in which case, there's still GWT. IMHO, with J2Cl, Java8, Elemental2, and JsInterop, you'll have a solution which lets you stay in Java 95% of the time, compile orders of magnitude faster than GWT, interoperate with arbitrary libraries with much less wrapper JSO boilerplate, and provide excellent integration with any Java IDE as far as coding is concerned. The round-tripping should be nearly as fast as Typescript. But if you're conformable with ES6 or TS, I'd say go for it. Always use whatever you're most productive in or what suits your needs. -Ray On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 12:25 AM, Robert Stone <rob.a.st...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Monday, 16 November 2015 18:52:50 UTC, Jens wrote: >> >> >> I'm not talking about a re-write here, I'm talking about new projects. >>> For new projects, I can't see a compelling reason for picking GWT, if the >>> devs are going to have to understand JS to use GWT then it is better to >>> invest up front time in getting them familiar enough with JS to use it for >>> the whole project. This is the decision we have taken in my organization. >>> >> >> If you just want to write that new app thingy that can do 3 things very >> well and your client side code never reaches a critical size then fine, I >> guess I would also skip GWT. But if you have a 500-5000 KLOC client side >> application then its a totally different story and you quickly wish that >> you would have used GWT/Java or a different language with better tooling >> support than JS. >> >> So THE compelling reason for picking GWT is your expected app size. Even >> for small apps for which I might want to skip GWT I would, at least, use >> TypeScript to put as much type information as possible into my code to help >> devs and IDEs to reason about code. >> >> -- J. >> > > We have 2 big applications, one written in GWT and the other (slightly > smaller) written in JS. The JS one is actually embedded inside the GWT app, > we had the chance to write it in GWT but our experience with writing the > big app led us to switch to JS. Don't get me wrong, GWT was the correct > decision at the time we started the main app (5 years ago) because it > solved the cross browser issues well and because of the relative immaturity > of JS frameworks/unit testing/build tools at the time. But JS frameworks > have improved so much over those years, the problems that used to plague > pure JS solutions are much easier to avoid now. > > I can't remember the last time I suffered an issue due to dynamic typing, > so I would disagree with you on the needing TypeScript point. My IDE of > choice for my JS dev is Sublime Text with a few plugins, I feel more > productive in that environment than in any of the 3 Java IDEs. With very > good unit tests in place our JS application has far better code coverage > than the GWT app and the ability to express/solve problems in JS seems to > naturally lead to a much smaller (and more understandable) code base than > the Java code. > > We will still be using GWT and I will be looking into what we can do with > the code base to take it forward, thankfully we are using MVP so it should > (in theory) be possible to move our views over to a more native solution > (possibly using Elemento) which would allow us to at least think about > moving to GWT 3. > > It may not sound like it, but I'm incredibly grateful for what GWT has > been able to offer me over the years, indeed I wouldn't be in my current > (very enjoyable) job without it :) > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "GWT Contributors" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to google-web-toolkit-contributors+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/google-web-toolkit-contributors/d03c7beb-f1ff-46ac-873c-5ad1b13a4438%40googlegroups.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/google-web-toolkit-contributors/d03c7beb-f1ff-46ac-873c-5ad1b13a4438%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "GWT Contributors" group. 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