GWT Future plan

Question

We have multiple product developed primarily using GWT and currently used by our end customers.

Wanted to know the road map of GWT. I got some unofficial update that google is moving there product which is developed in GWT to some other new technology. Is it true?

What is long term plan for GWT and also we haven't seen any new release from past one year. Any suggestions ?

Solution 1

In my opinion the GWT project is dead. The last stable version was released on Oct 19, 2017. As opposed to the other answer I would like to point out that the Google Trends score is relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. Since we are particularly interested in the long term chart it doesn't make sense to analyze the short time chart.

Let's instead have a look at the long term trends. The chart pretty much says it all - the project is facing a massive decline:

• Stackoverflow Trends

  

• Google Trends

  

This is what increased interest would look like:

• Example: Google Trends for Angular

  

Solution 2

I have worked over GWT and GXT for some time now, and as a developer I can say that - GWT/GXT based application are fast for UI development once the layout is done , and they are easy to debug also, there are so many libraries available - which are compatible with gwt and are free also , well there may not be that much of future release in gwt/gxt - but i think the versions of gwt/gxt which are available are powerful enough to develop a complete web application easily.

By the google trends , what I have got for GWT is as below -

and for GXT

If you see the trend for GWT and GXT near by end of 2018 - it has been increased a bit

If you dig into stack-overflow - you will get ton of questions and response around GWT and GXT

GWT questions

GXT questions

so i think - if you have team of good developers - who already have knowledge on GWT / GXT - you can go ahead -

All the best :)

Solution 3

We are using GWT in an embedded product for some years now with a small team of developers and I find it a plus that GWT is not rapidly developing, opposed to Angular. I am not so familiar with Angular (some other teams are using it), but what I hear from colleagues is that just maintaining the status quo (i.e. having all libraries reasonably up to date) is in it self a lot of work. We do not have the resources for this kind of software maintenance.

How are others experiences on this, has anyone moved from GWT to Angular with a small team and how are the experiences (from a resource point of view) to that?

Solution 4

We have a medium size project based on GWT in our company; It's a mature software, with more than 100,000 users and has performed well so far. However, GWT technology seems to become obsolete and I personally see no bright future for it, in competition with brand-new client-side rivals such as Angular. GWT had another minor release (2.9.0) several months ago, but it does not mean that project is still active and promising. I have had a relatively good experience using GWT so far and our clients get used to it as well, but the problem is that you might wake up someday and find out that a new version of Chrome or Firefox is released that no longer supports GWT mutations. Knowing that we gradually started migrating our client code to Angular which is of course very similar to GWT in the soul (Both are complete UI Frameworks; GWT transforms java to JS, while Angular does the same with TypeScript; both projects are supported by Google, and there are lots of widgets for both available out there).
I suggest that, despite all its costs, moving from GWT to another more up-to-date technology is inevitable and crucial IF the remaining of your software's lifetime is more than one or two years.

Solution 5

This is not a direct answer. Just thinking aloud.. perhaps..

But I've seen Vaadin (vaadin.com) using GWT (gwtproject.org) in the past and now changing to Polymer (polymer-project.org) in the recent years.

Can't deny the value GWT brings in through type-safety. So the question perhaps can rephrase to what alternatives developers have without re-writing the whole solution to support a new model/paradigm of a completely new framework.

If there is a way to overcome the slow compilation on GWT, it's still a great idea and a product, and will be for a long time. So worth finding an answer to the question I believe.. ??

Having said that, I wonder if Google still use GWT for Gmail and AdWords? :-) (Or the new interfaces meaning they've already crossed to the Polymer world!

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Comments

[mohammed sameen]

Thanks Raj for your response..i can see GWT has release 2.9.0 in may 2020

[Raj kannan Iyyappan]

@mohammedsameen Google teams are normally compete with each others. We can see Android/Java, Android/Kotlin and Flutter for mobile developments. For GWT, It may not be sustainable in near future, as most of the enterprise moves towards Angular. If we look closely the core Idea of Angular and GWT, they are same. But the great advantage for Angular, it has native support to Javascript (every javascript is a valid typescript code).

[Joelmob]

Point 1 and 2 is invalid. The j2cl (java to javascript compiler) project indicates that google is still interested in using Java for web development. For Androids API documentation, Java is the default option.. The choice to support Kotlin was probably made when the language increased in popularity. Angular is NOT superior. Both frameworks have type safety and libraries, GWTs compiler does a good job in helping you point out problems..