I also posted a reply here for anyone reading this thread instead of the other one
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-web-toolkit/-6KuZjHFD5c/yxouo-PHAwAJ On Thursday, May 30, 2019 at 10:33:30 PM UTC+3, Bob Lacatena wrote: > > I just posted this elsewhere, but as this thread has more current > responses, I'm reposing it in the hopes that someone will read it: > > > GWT is suffering from a very serious publicity debacle. I'm actively > doing GWT development, and regretting every moment of it right now. Years > ago I loved GWT. Today, I'm dreading it. > > My biggest problem for the past year has been the fact that unless one > hunts for threads like this, GWT does appear to be dead. I don't know what > the developers are doing. I just know there were occasional hints that > something was coming (a year ago), with not a sound since then. > > Update gwtproject.org! Put a few news items on it a month, at least. > Let people know you are working. No matter how good your work is, more and > more developers like me are going to abandon it as time drags on. > > Or create a GWT 3.0 blog. Something. Anything other than the black hole > of silence you have now. > > I'm also very concerned that with the rewrite, every bit of code I'm > working on now will be useless. GWT before 3.0, from a developer who uses > it, was and still is a nightmare if you don't want to use every widget, as > it exists, out of the box, because too many of the classes use private > members and methods, making them completely impossible to extend (which, I > believe, is sort of the point of a lot of OOP concepts). > > With GWT getting old, this is becoming painful, because GWT did cool > things, like animation and date pickers and rich text editors, by brute > force back when that was necessary. Now, however, HTML5 and other things > have evolved to offer better, cleaner solutions, but often it's difficult > to impossible to make GWT work with those solutions, because of the private > members. > > I've even gotten into vicious cycles; copy the source for class X, to be > able to fix it, but that requites a copy of private class Y, which requires > a copy of private class Z, and on and on until I give up. > > Instead, I have to "roll my own", which takes too much effort that could > be spend on more productive pursuits. I'd rather use a framework with > working widgets. > > I didn't start out intending this to be a rant, but the bottom line is > that I like GWT, I like being able to work exclusively in one > language/framework instead of four at one time (Java + Angular + TypeScript > + JQuery), but as a professional who is paid to make decisions that will > have a decade-long impact on my company, I am very hard-pressed not to > advise my company to immediately abandon all efforts using GWT. > > *Put some effort into communication! * [Which should be tattooed on the > backs of every software engineer's hands, because as a species they seem to > be oblivious to the concept.] > > I am somewhat heartened by the existence of this thread, but I can't wait > 6 months for GWT 3.0, only to find out it's not backwards compatible with > much of our efforts, and it's lost so much popularity in the wild that it's > considered a death-mark on one's resume. > > - Bob > > On Wednesday, May 29, 2019 at 8:54:05 PM UTC-4, Craig Mitchell wrote: >> >> Also, see here for more comments: >> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Google-Web-Toolkit/-6KuZjHFD5c >> > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "GWT Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/google-web-toolkit/685b42f9-045e-44ea-8889-71c6af5e6ea8%40googlegroups.com.
