Tuesday, October 6, 2020

Re: Why Don’t You Use Java for Programming the Client-Side Web Apps on Web Browser?

Let me start by stating that I totally agree that the GUI technology used is not really that important. It is after all just cross compiled to the browser platform. So knowledge of the platform is much more important.

In the organisations that I work we mostly with contractors. People are selected based on their prior experience with specific technologies because we need people to be efficient very quickly. You really need to know the frameworks very well because many GWT power features require some experience and a different way of working than what people are used to.

We do check for generic knowledge of programming, design or browser features and most of the time that drives our decision to hire someone much more than a deep GWT specific knowledge. But we often have people that refuse our offer purely because it is GWT. The reason is that they see it as a bad career move to work in a project that uses a framework that they think is dead. I'm not making this up, we had this response many times. And it makes sense from their point of view. Contractors need to stay relevant in the market. CV's are filtered on buzzwords and technologies. I sometimes feel anxious as well since I have many years of GWT knowledge, but I know that all companies are looking for other frameworks and don't care about the arguments.

In the backend the focus on frameworks is a bit less extreme because they are all based on the same language and the frameworks like spring and EJB are very old and well understood and part of a vibrant community. If you are still depending on Struts and handcrafted SQL/JDBC on the server side then you will probably meet the same resistance to hire people.
On 6 Oct 2020, 14:21 +0200, Vegegoku <akabme@gmail.com>, wrote:
I am still don't know why people call the developer like this, GWT developers, Angular developers, React developers...etc.. have we ever called developers like `Spring developers`, `hibernate developers`, `Rest developers` ..etc... I would say we have Java developers and JS developers, developers belong to the ecosystem, not to the framework or the library. GWT, for example, is just a compiler, you need people who know java and the java echo system, not GWT, you can make them GWT familiar way faster than you think, you don't even need them to know this is GWT it is just Java. I have done this with few Java developers I showed them that I am building a web application with java without telling them it was GWT and they were impressed, they even built some small apps with the little information I gave to them. The same goes for JS, if you have a developer who just knows Angular, but does not know JavaScript or can't work with other JS frameworks then that is not a good fit in the team. after all the Angular is just like Spring it is one of the frameworks in the ecosystem.

Normally when I work with the fresh developers I ask them to build a sample application using whatever JS framework they prefer, then I show them that they can do it in Java without telling them it is GWT. and in many times they feel WoWed. not implying that one is better but they get wowed how they can do it in both, the good thing about those fresh developers is that they don't have a previous preference of ecosystem over the other, but in the other hand they don't know both ecosystems as they should be.



On Tuesday, October 6, 2020 at 12:21:21 PM UTC+3 David Nouls wrote:
Hi Lofi,

In my company we are the only group that is working with GWT to develop a new customer facing application. We have a few products in maintenance mode that are also using GWT. But most new developments are using Angular.

The biggest problems we are facing with using GWT/Java for the client are:
- Lack of developers with GUI and GWT skills
- Lack of developers who are even willing to learn GWT.  GWT is seen as a dead technology after Google pushed it out.
- Management does not like us to keep on using GWT for the same reason.

I managed to convince management to use GWT for our product because we have a long history of using GWT and we had experience before with the maintenance burdens of using JavaScript in the past. And we can deliver GUI changes quite quickly (in many cases much faster than the teams using Angular).

But we do have a big problem finding GWT developers or finding people who want to learn it. And that is a very big risk for a project.

I know that there is active development going on in GWT and J2CL but, you barely see blog posts about GWT or libraries being released for it.
The gwtproject page is mostly stale, the documentation is mostly about old API's. The more advanced features takes some time to find and learn.

If you compare that with the constant release cycle and amount of info/noise I see related to Angular and other Frameworks then it is understandable that people have the impression that GWT is dead.

On Thursday, September 24, 2020 at 9:02:18 PM UTC+2 lofid...@gmail.com wrote:
I would like to know, what are the obstacles for you as Java developers not using Java as programming language for writing Web browser apps. Web browser apps are client-side and not server-side Web apps. 
I would like to know from you... Java developers...

Thanks, Lofi


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