Interesting. ...and here I was thinking gwt was dead in the water these days.
Cant say Im in any particular hurry to go down that path again (used to use gwt, it was a headache in production), but there is certainly something to be said for sharing a single language for both server and client.
I remember using GWT as my first venture into dynamic web applications. I didn't really understand what was going on at the time 4 years ago, but I ended up making something kind of cool.
I too have a draw to the single language concept which is why Node was initially appealing to me. Thinking about it, there is a lot of <language> to JavaScript compilers, so I assume one could cobble a single language server / client setup for web development (though it wouldn't be as complete)
can you shed some light as to what the headaches were? I m quite interested in real world usages of gwt, but i don't often hear much about its use (despite the fact that i know it's still being used quite a lot, just internally in companies).
Let me caveat anything I say as being 3 years out of date.
The biggest and most annoying issue was that it generated a per-browser file for each variation of the compiled javascript. This resulted in a set of hashed javascript filenames to deploy in production, and while more efficient (why load IE specific code on safari?), it had some down sides:
- Every tiny change resulted in new files with new names. If you're deploying using binary diffs this is just a no go, because you have no way of knowing which of the 7 hashed filenames from last time matches the filename this time. You have to redeploy the entire application basically, for a typo. For large applications, this sucked.
- When a new browser version comes out, if you're lucky it 'just works'. I recall an update to IE where we were 'not lucky' and had to rebuild and redeploy every application to support the new version of the browser working at all.
- 3rd party javascript things had a mysterious tendency to work fine locally and then break in the live environment. I recall never figuring this one out, but something we were doing with GWT & the dom would sometimes just break, but would work fine locally if you ran the debugger. A lot of 'randomly remove and change code until it works'. :/
There are other issues with GWT that ultimately led us to stop using it (googles lack luster support, other new tools that were more designer friendly, new developers having to install a very specific toolset to be able to work on projects being the big ones), but those were the annoying production issues I personally encountered and had to deal with.
Not show stoppers by any means, but I'm certainly in no hurry to go back.
Cant say Im in any particular hurry to go down that path again (used to use gwt, it was a headache in production), but there is certainly something to be said for sharing a single language for both server and client.