I have programmed in GWT in past. The advantage over Struts 2 is GWT's component model. It allows to reuse code and leverage your favorite safe refactoring tools (say Eclipse). JSP sucks on refactoring.
The main GWT disadvantage is Java-to-JavaScript compilation. It has no incremental compilation. As project gets bigger - the compilation gets more time. After compilation you have no access to GWT's JavaScript. If you want to make little changes for running application and to see immediate changes - then you need to recompile a GWT module. Sometimes, just to compose some simple widget with couple of divs, I have finished up running GWT app in Firefox with Firebug plugin. With GWT I often reinvented the wheels. Let's take validation. Such as GWT is mostly client side thing (JS) you cannot relay on JS validation. Definitely you should perform validation on server. Then you need to populate all validation messages to corresponding widgets (inputs). GWT does not have buit in valadation. And you cannot simply add validation messages to widgets. So you probably need to wrap standard widgets. And so on... But there are many GWT libraries. And maybe all my problems can be covered. And with a new version of GWT 2.0, it got many improvements like: - development mode; - code splitting; - declarative UI with UiBinder. You can read about new stuff here: http://googlewebtoolkit.blogspot.com/2009/12/introducing-google-web-toolkit-20-now.html So I do not know... There is no silver bullet. And for now I am using Struts 2. P.S. If you have thought about a new web framework, then you definitely should checkout Lift (in Scala). http://liftweb.net/ It also has demo page: http://demo.liftweb.net/ Lift features: - you can use all your Java code (Spring, JPA, ...); - Scala's syntax sugar e.g. multiple inheritance - helpful thing in big apps;; - built-in XML support (by Scala) - really cool thing, you can reuse it in method calls; - it is a component framework like GWT, again - refactoring, reusing...; - you are not bind to one action per request, but you can have as many "actions" per request as you want due to component nature of Lift; - and much more. Saeed Iqbal-2 wrote: > > I know we are talking about another framework but I can get honest replies > here compared to the GWT user group. > > I have been reading about GWT being a single page programming where > refreshes are not appropriate and reading more like here > http://www.onthoo.com/blog/programming/2008/02/why-i-dumped-gwt.html > > Is GWT good to also program in? I know Struts 2 is the king > > -- > Saeed Iqbal > Independant Consultant > J2EE - Application Architect / Developer > > -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/Feasibility-of-Programming-in-GWT-tp26841927p26851923.html Sent from the Struts - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: user-unsubscr...@struts.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: user-h...@struts.apache.org
