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I am wondering if there are specific cases where GWT is not suitable? For example would it be approriate to re-develop Stack Overflow using GWT?

I am developing an app which has a Java Restlet API and I was planning on using GWT (previously I would just have used bog-standard HTML/CSS with back-end PHP code calling an API). I am wondering if there are reasons why I shouldnt choose to do this?

christophmccann
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    GWT is aimed at easing the process of creating web "applications". I don't think it would be a good idea to re-develop a "web site" like Stackoverflow in GWT. Google docs and GMail come to mind when we speak of web applications (you don't navigate away from the page, it is dynamically refreshed using Ajax, interactive LnF like a real application etc.) Of course, YMMV :-) – Sanjay T. Sharma Dec 16 '10 at 17:02

4 Answers4

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My answer is not full but I believe the following bullets may be useful.

  • GWT should not be used for applications that mostly present textual information and some pictures, i.e. not very interactive. For these applications GWT does not bring you a lot of benefits.
  • GWT should not be used by teams that have strong web skill and relatively weak java skills.
  • Do not use GWT if you are required to support browsers that GWT does not support officially. For example MSIE 6.
Igor Popov
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AlexR
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    GWT does support MSIE 6: http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/doc/latest/FAQ_GettingStarted.html#What_browsers_does_GWT_support? Actually, it even compiles a special permutation for it, with lots of workarounds. Did you mean IE 5.5? – Chris Lercher Dec 17 '10 at 00:57
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have a look at this topic GWT for big projects?

GWT is best choice to manipulate complex actions in a single page. like Google wave, Google mail ... you can easily update (ajax) any part of the page.

Because of the GWT is java-to-javascript compiler, user should wait the loading of .js files and it causes many and many problems if your web app is big. The bigger your project, the bigger javascript files, the more user should wait the loading of .js files

Community
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IMHO If you have a static looking website like a blog, news portals, etc which each page has its own identity and represents an entity and is requested separately don't use GWT alone (you can still mix it with server-side generated pages like FB).

For most of other web apps especially if users sign in to use your app or your app is interactive and there is no technical problem use GWT (like Gmail design).

Ali Shakiba
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I would propose to avoid GWT at any cost. I have experience developing huge project with GWT and it is nightmare, because of long development circle. If you have application in angularjs/react/jquery, you update source code, click F5 and reload it. You can quickly debug clicking F12.

If you use GWT on huge project, you have to wait ~1 min for app to compile. And then there is no good way to debug it. Google provided special browser plugins, but they worked unstable and didn't support last versions of browsers, so I had to downgrade FF. Also huge GWT app debuggin takes tons of java memory, so you have to provide more memory to tomcat. And finally in practice you can't avoid learning js, you will have to learn it if you do modern web development.

UPDATE 15.05.2017: My answer was downvoted by GWT fans, but I'd like to note, that my info is up to date: 1-page hello world app rebuild cyrcle takes about 30seconds with last IDEA and 10Gb mem SSD notebook. I also asked friends having GWT in production for serious project: they claim 2min is average redeploy time.

Stepan Yakovenko
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