We are crafting a system which will help to overcome the difficulties which Java developers have when they try to make a modern front-end utilising great frameworks and technologies from JavaScript world.

The first step is done, we made a visual development tool Structor (https://github.com/ipselon/structor) for React UI.

The next step will be a bunch of source code generators, which will produce React components along with Ajax methods for REST endpoints. Shortly, Structor will generate all source code for UI components along with the glue code for connection to the back end.

In addition, there will be starter-kits which include different combinations of Spring Boot application, set of ReactUI components, and etc. We are on the early stage, but I think this will greatly simplify the development of the front-end for the enterprise.

Just to clarify our approach I made a video. Here you can see how to create a sign in menu for Facebook and GooglePlus in Structor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ks2tWAJvDqo

What do you think about such approach?

The problem with these starter kits is that they often generate so much stuff that you end up spending more time removing stuff you don't want than actually building what you need right from the start. Spring Roo was offering something similar for JSP, JSF, GWT, it has so many complex proxy classes that I eventually abandoned it. It's still a great tool for generating the DB models.

I guess anything is better than GWT these days, need to write too much code in GWT to get any useful work done.