Yeah, I’ve figured out that the main drawback to GWT is that its userbase is comprised almost entirely of head-up-ass Java ppl.
Update 11:45 Yeah I’m about to the fetal position point of frustration with this thing.
Update 2:38 Slashdot: Is Anyone Using the GWT? made me feel a little bit better. If I had a Slashdot account I would say that GWT is great for Java developers, bad for “traditional” (web) UI people like myself. Java is widely adopted, but usually not for public-facing stuff. (I mean, if there was a continuum of ease-of-entry in web technologies LAMP would be on one side and Java would be on the other. If you don’t believe me name a Java shared hosting provider off the top of your head.) So the Java people don’t really care about the value GWT provides, and the people who want the value have such a huge barrier to entry we get super frustrated*. See also: above comment about head- ass Java ppl.
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And while I’m not a huge OOP kind of guy, I have worked in similar environments before (.NET…hated it!), and understand on a high level what’s going on here. But when the consume-and-spit-out-raw-XML example is over 200 lines of code (and won’t even run out of the box, besides) and when I try to re-build it in a little bit more practical manner (actually putting the content into page elements) I run into casting issues or broken library references or scope issues or according-to-this-error-I-am-CLEARLY-missing- something-basic-about-how-Java-is-structured-slash-compiles before I’ve even written enough code to run…at currently 119 lines of code… …now I’m depressed again…