GWT Strength compared to other framework?

Question

One of the main strength of GWT is to code in java and everything gets compiled and is loaded by several browsers through gwt deferred binding??

Apart from this, i.e. working only on a single code base, do GWT has any other advantage compared to other existing framework??

Edit: I'm trying to say why should we use gwt and not another framework?? What is there in GWT that makes it special for web application development?? What GWT makes for us and another framework or toolkit don't do??

As i said above GWT makes deferred binding which is a plus, so I wanted what other things it do that makes it special and unique??

Answer 1

My point of view :

Pure Java : In standard web application you write html, css, php, javascript, mysql and others and others. In gwt you write java and java and java. Pure Java knowledge is enough for everything.

gwt-rpc mechanism is very simple to communicate with server and uibinder or any other tools are enough for ui development. plus there are many widgets that facilitate front-end developing

Debug : Debugging Java code is very very easy than debugging Javascript code

MVP Development with Activities and Places

Compiler that you can do all the thing, that you can do in Javascript, in GWT. In addition, working with JSON and XML is very easy and History management is unbleviable

and at last I'm a big big fan of Google and they did it so they did the right thing

Answer 2

One of the other benefits of GWT is that you can share code between the client and server components of your app. For example, if you're doing a graphical app you can write computational geometry code and have the same code evaluate on both sides. Of course, you can also do the same thing by using server-side Javascript (for example, Node.js), but server-side Java has serious advantages for performance, ease of deployment, and interoperability with other things.

Answer 3

My favorite benefit is their RPC mechanisms. JSON gives you a huge reduction in payload size, but GWT's serialization policies allow the data to be sent over the wire without key labels for each value and reduces payload size by another 30% or so. On top of that, its easy to build those services using Spring and Hibernate.

Another benefit is the use of md5 hashes for the filenames of compiled JavaScript, allowing you to set never expires cache headers for all of your code.

Last but not least (actually, it is the least cool of the benefits), there are free tools now for GUI design so you don't have to build a GUI by writing XML and Java or HTML and CSS.

Answer 4

GWT follows a principle of no compromise high-performance Javascript.

They have already invested a lot of work into making your application highly performant. For instance, the "compiled" Javascript files it generates are actually .html files. This is due to an issue that some browsers do not correctly support compressed .js files. This sort of tweaking is beyond what most people would do manually.

There are easy to use tools to help you improve the performance of your own application. GWT.runAsync, for instance, allows you to define splitting points in your Javascript which will be used to automatically divide up monolithic Javascript files into bite sized chunks to load.

As has been said, the RPC mechanism performance and ease of design is amazing. MD5 hash based names for the compiled Javascript means for great caching.

My biggest plus for GWT still has to be the debugging capabilities. Javascript debugging has always been messy and frustrating. With GWT you can employ the full debugging facilities of Java when working on your client side code.

Answer 5

There are no simple answers to these questions:

I'm trying to say why should we use gwt and not another framework?? What is there in GWT that makes it special for web application development?? What GWT makes for us and another framework or toolkit don't do??

There is no silver bullet. Everything depends on the project and requirements. GWT may be good in one project and other frameworks may be good in other projects. It also depends which other frameworks are taken into account.

In my opinion the most significant element which makes GWT different from almost all other Java web frameworks is that the client side is fully in JavaScript while most of other frameworks generate usually plain HTML code. The JavaScript approach to the client has its benefits, to name a few:

• it is fully AJAX which creates great user experience,
• views state is managed in the browser,
• it communicates with the server asynchronously;
• it communicates with the server only to get the datal

However, there are also some drawbacks:

• browser history support - it isn't as good as in HTML based frameworks; proper use of history mechanism isn't easy and requires extra effort from developers;
• applications aren't SEO friendly;
• more complicated page layouts may kill web browsers - sometimes it takes a long time to generate a page, especially when using additional component libraries;

For developers it is very important that GWT hides JS from them. You write in Java and you get fully working AJAX based client application in JS usually without touching a single line of JS. This is great especially when you need a lot of AJAX in your application and you don't know JS. This is specific to GWT - using JS and AJAX in other frameworks isn't usually that easy (Vaadin may be an exception but it is GWT based).

It is worth mentioning that in many cases GWT can be combined with other web frameworks - this way you can have most of you application content created in HTML based frameworks and some more complicated AJAX parts in GWT.

Answer 6

If you want a recent comparison of Java Web Frameworks, here is an interesting presentation from Devoxx 2010 : http://raibledesigns.com/rd/entry/my_comparing_jvm_web_frameworks