GWT 2.0: So good it's ridiculous • Hacker News Board

Re: GWT 2.0: So good it's ridiculous

#21

Post by DTrejo » Sun, Dec 13, 2009, 2:40 PM UTC

jonmc12 wrote: post #8

GWT always sounds interesting, but I am underwhelmed by the application gallery. Every app looks like a draft version of gmail, google maps or google wave. Any links to impressive interfaces (non google-built)?

I would say speed tracer, but that is google-built.

Re: GWT 2.0: So good it's ridiculous

#22

Post by madair » Sun, Dec 13, 2009, 3:02 PM UTC

donjaime_hn wrote: post #3

richcollins wrote: post #2

How could trading the expressiveness of JS for the expressiveness of Java without the commensurate increase in performance be "So good it's ridiculous".

You clearly didn't RTFA. I'll give you my personal reasons for liking GWT in a few short bullets. 1. Better tooling - IDE refactoring when I need to change things. Red squigglies when I make a typo or reference something thats not there. A real debugger with breakpoints for finding bugs. Auto completion and auto style formatting so I dont have to type so goddamn much. 2. Compiler optimizations - Your code gets faster…

Good response to the question, which was clearly loaded

Re: GWT 2.0: So good it's ridiculous

#23

Post by jauco » Sun, Dec 13, 2009, 3:30 PM UTC

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #20

ivenkys wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define clean.

Doesn't require some third-party (which tend to lag behind the latest versions) library to get it working and I can write normal server side code in Python, etc.

You can run a REST server and make your callbacks using JSON. That's what I did a while back. PHP could be used without problems.

Re: GWT 2.0: So good it's ridiculous

#24

Post by ibsulon » Sun, Dec 13, 2009, 3:32 PM UTC

jonmc12 wrote: post #8

GWT always sounds interesting, but I am underwhelmed by the application gallery. Every app looks like a draft version of gmail, google maps or google wave. Any links to impressive interfaces (non google-built)?

I suggest looking at the EXT-GWT library for what is possible. I'm using it in a project where its GPLness doesn't matter.

Re: GWT 2.0: So good it's ridiculous

#25

Post by eplanit » Sun, Dec 13, 2009, 4:22 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #14

Those who like statc-typing will always find it ridiculously great. Those used to dynamic-typing will find the idea of writing JavaScript in Java ridiculous, but not great. There is wisdom in the middle.

Well put. Thank you.

Re: GWT 2.0: So good it's ridiculous

#26

Post by johnyzee » Sun, Dec 13, 2009, 4:33 PM UTC

jonmc12 wrote: post #8

GWT always sounds interesting, but I am underwhelmed by the application gallery. Every app looks like a draft version of gmail, google maps or google wave. Any links to impressive interfaces (non google-built)?

We build TeamPostgreSQL with GWT. It is a PostgreSQL web administration package. Feel free to to take a look:

http://www.teampostgresql.com

The download package comes with a bundled sample database, so you can take it for a spin too. Feedback welcome.

Re: GWT 2.0: So good it's ridiculous

#27

Post by DenisM » Sun, Dec 13, 2009, 5:40 PM UTC

kls wrote: post #17

While, GWT is a very impressive feat of technical accomplishment. It really misses the mark, the problem with it as well as most of the old desktop development (languages, toolkits, frameworks) is that it favored the developer over the designer. This is one of the reasons for the popularity of the web, it allowed the designer (and the want-to-be designer) the ability to design and build interfaces without having to k…

You should give it another look - GWT2.0 has declarative UI language and HTML can be directly embedded into it.

Re: GWT 2.0: So good it's ridiculous

#28

Post by DenisM » Sun, Dec 13, 2009, 5:44 PM UTC

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #15

Pardon my ignorance but is there a clean way to run GWT with non-JVM server side languages?

Yes, you can make XMLHTTPRequest backend calls, although it's a bit of a pain to debug due to same-origin policy. If you get to this basically you have to turn off built-in GWT server and use your own to serve both GWT-compiled code and your XML requests.

Re: GWT 2.0: So good it's ridiculous

#29

Post by donjaime_hn » Sun, Dec 13, 2009, 5:56 PM UTC

kls wrote: post #17

While, GWT is a very impressive feat of technical accomplishment. It really misses the mark, the problem with it as well as most of the old desktop development (languages, toolkits, frameworks) is that it favored the developer over the designer. This is one of the reasons for the popularity of the web, it allowed the designer (and the want-to-be designer) the ability to design and build interfaces without having to k…

You should look at UiBinder (part of GWT 2.0). You write HTML and CSS, stick it into a UIBinder template. And in 5 minutes you can take a designed mock and have it bound to a Java class in a very efficient way.

You get things like CSS namespacing and obfuscation for free with this approach too.

Re: GWT 2.0: So good it's ridiculous

#30

Post by donjaime_hn » Sun, Dec 13, 2009, 6:05 PM UTC

mikedouglas wrote: post #6

donjaime_hn wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You clearly didn't RTFA. I'll give you my personal reasons for liking GWT in a few short bullets. 1. Better tooling - IDE refactoring when I need to change things. Red squigglies when I make a typo or reference something thats not there. A real debugger with breakpoints for finding bugs. Auto completion and auto style formatting so I dont have to type so goddamn much. 2. Compiler optimizations - Your code gets faster…

Was the personal attack at the end necessary?

Probably not. I sometimes get annoyed when people, faced with the choice of gaining some domain knowledge before forming an opinion, decide to instead just be loud about things they know little about.

Personal attacks are lame though, even on the internet. Thanks for calling me out on it :).

I apologize.