GWT - Strictly limited to Java developers ? No !
By dgirard on Saturday 4 October 2008, 19:35 - GWT Slides - Permalink
This is a slide extract from John Resig presentation. Even if I respect a lot John for JQuery, I don't agree with him about what he thinks about GWT : GWT is not about java. It is about using a object oriented language to build ajax applications. And I think that Javascript, PHP and .NET developers will love GWT.
Comments
Compile time is starting to get frustrating when working with GWT. I work with GWT 1.5 on a daily basis and compile time time has really slowed down development. Sure there is always hosted mode but constantly working in hosted mode has really come back to bite my team in the past where bugs have appeared in the compiled code that did not manifest in hosted mode (due to hosted mode not doing compilation/optimization.) Tweaks exist to lower compilation time but it means compiling for a single browser. The bugs up on issue tracker about this include http://code.google.com/p/google-web... (marked as a dup, but I disagree with that) and http://code.google.com/p/google-web...
Hosted mode will be much more useful when the rendering engine can be chosen, so that you don't have to do a full compile/browse to check your code in different browsers.
But this is only wishful thinking...
More interesting than the presentation are the comments towards the end in that Ajaxian post. Some good stuff :)