* Note: I am cross-posting this on GWT-contributors group to solicit the responses of the GWT team. The original post on the GWT group is at : https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/google-web-toolkit/CnjBcJsknS0 *
The following were two direct quotes from Joseph Smarr (tech lead of google plus -- plus.google.com): (FYI: The full Q & A with the Google+ Tech Lead can be found at: http://anyasq.com/79-im-a-technical-lead-on-the-google+-team) *"we often render our Closure templates server-side so the page renders before any JavaScript is loaded, then the JavaScript finds the right DOM nodes and hooks up event handlers, etc. to make it responsive (as a result, if you're on a slow connection and you click on stuff really fast, you may notice a lag before it does anything, but luckily most people don't run into this in practice)."* *"The cool thing about Closure templates is they can be compiled into both Java and JavaScript. So we use Java server-side to turn the templates into HTML, but we can also do the same in JavaScript client-side for dynamic rendering. For instance, if you type in a profile page URL directly, we'll render it server-side, but if you go to the stream say and navigate to someone's profile page, we do it with AJAX and render it client-side using the same exact template. "* Going from the tone of the above two quotes, it seems to me that the lack of server-side templating system in GWT (GWT has client-side templating in the form of UiBinder but not server-side templating) , could have been *one of the reasons* for not choosing GWT for the Google+ project. What do you guys think?? Was the lack of server side templating in GWT one of the reasons why Google+ team did not choose GWT ?? PS: If you guys haven't tried Google+ yet, I would recommend you try it. Setting aside how good of a social network/social collaboration tool it is, I suggest you guys try it just to get a feel of its UI architecture. Every once in a while, an application comes along and raises the bar(eg., Gmail in 2004) in the area of UI design/UI development and I think Google plus has done it this time around. Also, I really appreciate the fact that GWT is an exceptional work of engineering. My desire is to just provoke discussion in a direction that hopefully leads to making the product even more better and increases its technological "moat" (Warren Buffet lingo: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/333-warren-buffett-on-castles-and-moats) -- http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Web-Toolkit-Contributors
