Wednesday, December 2, 2015

Re: Teavm

Not sure if TeaVM serves different need than GWT. Seems like both want to provide a better alternative to JavaScript.
Now TeaVM does not have anything equivalent to GWT widgets but then  it seems, after watching the GWT Create session videos, the recommendation, for newer apps, is not to use the GWT widgets anyway.
Instead of GWT widgets the direction seems to be to use more HTML5 based components like web components polymer etc which technology like the newer GWT JSInterop could make it easier to consume.
Like GWT JSInterop , TeaVM has something called JSO which also propose to make consuming java script libraries easier.
I haven't used JSInterop or JSO so can't compare the two.
Besides JSO wich provides interop with JS libraries, there is forthcoming project called TeaVM Flavour. It's a framework similar to Angular, but written entirely in Java. I have a lot of disappointing experience with GWT widgets (but still use it, as it's still 10 times better than maintaining megabytes of JS code), since it's virtually impossible to create good widget-based abstraction over HTML technoligies. A better approach is a thin layer of abstraction, wich allows easy interaction with underlying nature of HTML.

I could take experience of dukescript guys (BTW, TeaVM can be used as dukescript backend) and wrap existing libraries like Angular and Knockout. However, I don't think it is a good approach, since I ask myself: what makes me use Java on front-end? My answer is: it's static typing. When I refactor code, I get errors displayed immediately in Eclipse and have a chance to fix them before I even run application. Consider I wrap angular and pass Java method name to ng-click directive. If later I refactor my Java code and this method got renamed, I won't get any feedback from IDE. And so on. I took many cases and figured out that pure Java-based approach is far superior than JavaScript wrappers, except for complexity.

--
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 google-web-toolkit+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to google-web-toolkit@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-web-toolkit.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

No comments:

Post a Comment