I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Wicket [0]. In an architect role a couple of years ago, I got a couple of diehard GWT folks to give Wicket a try, and we finished the project. Recently, one of the two started showing up on the wicket-user list, so he's clearly found it to be a preferrable environment. I can't speak for someone who's used GWT and switched, but I think it says a lot that someone would stick with it like that.
Google will return lots of results for the search "gwt versus wicket", but one that has been considered a standout over the years is [1]. [2] provides some great side-by-side examples of Wicket code and live results. Wicket is structured a bit closer to how I understand Rails to be structured, with a JavaScript kernel that gets downloaded to the client. Wicket provides a rich Java-based API that uses this kernel to manipulate the DOM on the client. There is no recompilation for JavaScript, and the runtime is fast, so there are no speed issues, either in development or deployment. As far as modularity, Wicket is completely modular without hacks. It is an Apache TLP. As full disclosure, Wicket can be tricky in an OSGi environment because it serializes page object graphs for handling the back button. Pax Wicket provides one solution to the problem, and many experienced folks roll their own. The problem is created when different OSGi modules instantiate and contribute objects to a graph. The graph can be serialized without incident, but deserializing a graph that contains objects contributed from different bundles is not possible because of classloader issues. Please let me know if there's any questions I can answer. Cheers, Brian [0] http://wicket.apache.org [1] http://ptrthomas.wordpress.com/2008/09/04/wicket-and-gwt-compared-with-code/ [2] http://wicket.apache.org/learn/examples/ On Oct 13, 2010, at 4:34 AM, Marcel Offermans wrote: > Hey all, > > Some time ago, we started work on a web based UI for ACE based on GWT. > Feature wise, GWT is great, providing a nice web UI that supports things like > drag and drop. There are two big downsides of GWT though: > > The first is that the javascript generation is rather slow, making the > development cycle when doing UI updates fairly slow. > > The second is that there is no way to modularize the GWT based UI. You always > have to compile it in one go. > > In my opinion, Vaadin [1], a toolkit built on top of GWT that is released > under the Apache Licence Version 2.0, solves both issues nicely. I'm > seriously considering moving the whole UI to it. WDYT? > > Greetings, Marcel > > [1] http://vaadin.com/ > >
