Re: GWT - Still Active ?

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

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