GWT's monolithic compile makes for really efficient JavaScript/ Resource downloads. In terms of providing a solution to the sort of "traditional" kinds of web app problems, it's hard to argue that GWT couldn't optimize whatever a developer would write because developers write for flexibility - whereas the compile is about "there is 1 use at the end of the day and everything else is just noise".
I'm sort of wondering though, are there classes of problems that GWT is admittedly not a good fit for (specifically, according to the GWT team itself) specifically because of that approach? It's kind of hard to explain a concrete example, but let's try this: If every gadget for iGoogle had to be developed in GWT - each iGoogle gadget would contain everything that it needed and rely on nothing shared, despite the fact that most gadgets would (according to the compile reports) potentially share as much as 99% of their dependencies. Simply because they are disparate compiles, the compiler's view into the world is just too small... Hypothetically speaking, if the average gadget were something like 50k, and something like 48k of that was just "core stuff", this implies that a page with 10 gadgets would be something like 500k (of just script), but 480k of that was largely just "repeated" core code. I suppose it guarantees that things won't "break" to an extent with versioning, but wouldn't it be more efficient in this hypothetical example to have coded the flexibility into the gadget "container" once? In other words - if the core were provided and the gadgets merely used it, the total size of the page would be 68k instead of 500... Right? And the more gadgets are there, the bigger the "savings". In this kind of case - would the GWT team say "GWT is the right choice" or no? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Web Toolkit" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-web-toolkit?hl=en.
