Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Re: GWT seems deprecated according to Thoughtworks

Generally I agree with most of the comments,

GWT is trying to bring sanity (which is good) to an insane platform HTML/CSS/JS essentially a document viewing platform gone mad.

However

1) GWT widgets are not simpler than Swing. I have done Qt (that's sane), Swing (so and so with occasional insanities and weird memory leaks) and GWT (platform is insane), In Qt and Swing I was doing pixel hunting while I was learning the platform. In GWT I am always doing it. Not a GWT fault per se but still I don't think it is true to state that GWT is simpler that swing in its widgets (i.e easier layout, clear parent child relationships)

2) When the author speaks about the powerfulness of javascript I think he is referring to something like this http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html . I don't know Lisp but supposedly javascript took its closures from scheme, a Lisp dialect, so that makes javascript pretty powerful according to the link I provided. Got it. In the mean time I simply cannot live without a compiler and strong type checking. I can't live, I can't maintain.

3) Stateless: I don't understand how the author managed to connect event driven GUI (which is good) with stateless. Stateless is good. The opposite is stateful. Stateful means the server knows stuff about the client and has some state to track him. Stateful doesn't scale. Stateles does scale.

    Vassilis


On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 3:34 PM, Marko <marko.krajnc@cursor.si> wrote:
My comments to ThoughtWorks radar (I guess they are not from Martin Fowler, but from some more novice JS developer):

>> write Swing-like Java code...
GWT widgets are much simpler and cleaner than Swing. But you don't have to use GWT widgets - you can use UI Binder with pure HTML and style it with CSS...

>> Second, if the JavaScript doesn't behave exactly as you want you will have to hack the generated code.
This comment shows, that the writer has no deep knowladge of GWT. I've been using it since 2008 on MANY projects and never needed to hack the generated code.

>> Third, using Java to generate JavaScript means that you can't take direct advantage of the powerful features of JavaScript or numerous libraries such as JQuery.
This is also not true. On one of my project I've integrated JQuery and GWT.

>> Finally, the JUnit support is quite limited, for example code using reflection cannot be tested.
Please show me your JavaScript code with reflection you would like to test... :-) I rarely use reflection anyway...

>> First, in many ways, JavaScript is more powerful and expressive than Java
This is a very subjective one. I feel exactly the other way around... :-9

>> Secondly, it is impossible to hide a complex abstraction difference like that from event-driven desktop to stateless-web without leaky abstraction headaches eventually popping up.
Stateless web means request-based web apps, which is very bad for me. I like client based event-driven UI (AJAX / GMail-like).

>> Third, it suffers from the same shortcomings of many elaborate frameworks, where building simple, aligned applications is quick and easy, building more sophisticated but not supported functionality is possible but difficult, and building the level of sophistication required by any non-trivial application becomes either impossible or so difficult it isn't reasonable.
Once again the author show it has no deep knowledge of GWT. With GWT you can build very complex apps in a structured way. Everything is type and compile-time checked...

And some have said before me: GWT is not perfect, but up until now I haven't seen any better alternative...

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Vassilis Virvilis

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