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Shai Almog
Yak Barber, duck whisperer, hunter of bugs, feeder of dogs, heap climber, stack explorer and rider of shells
Thank you for this article, I am the author of @dominokit which domino-ui is part of, I am using GWT in a big project, 264+ screens, around 100K LoC, running in production in 14+ sites, The team started with 2 developer working on both frontend and backend, then reduced to 1 developer since it was enough to keep up with a 10+ backend developers adding features to the application.
We have great look and feel UI, excellent performance, the is compiled and jzipped on the wire to just 800KB, and most important excellent maintainability, we can get any #java developer to ride in in few hours when we want.
GWT have never been dead, we got version 2.9 recently with java 11 support, and 2.10 is coming very soon, and after that we are doing java 17 support and add language features. we already implemented some thanks to Colin Alworth.
The community around GWT despite being small but it is a very active community, try to ask a question in the gitter channels or in the google group and see how fast you will get the answer.
The tools and frameworks around it have also been under heavy active development, those are modern tools and frameworks that covers almost every aspect if web development, and you get it all with one stack, Java.
Interesting. When we started Codename One we wrote the UI for the web interface in GWT. It was awesome to work with but it was hard getting the "native" stuff working. E.g. mixing in custom JavaScript and getting the CSS look and feel right. Eventually we moved to bootstrap for the UI and now use Codename Ones JavaScript port for the UI.
We use react on typescript in Lightrun and it's an absolute pain for me personally. But it does have the advantage of wide skill set in terms of hiring. That's basically what it comes down to. I wish technologies like GWT would get better PR and traction but I'm not sure how we can get there.