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copied!<p>I've written fairly large sized app in GWT, and i have to say that i'm even more impressed by GWT than i was when the project started. My general 'feel' of the platform is that things are really well thought out, and they don't do things unless they can do it well, and can do it well on all browsers (IE users are still your users!)</p> <p>Now, keep in mind that what GWT really excels at is the creation of large, highly dynamic single-page style webapps. If your goal is to enhance an otherwise static page with some javascript effects, than GWT is massive overkill (gquery may change this, but i don't have experience with gquery)</p> <p>Some features I enjoy include:</p> <ul> <li>The ability to share code between the server side and the client side. (if your server side is written in java, of course). I didn't expect to use this a lot of this at first, but in practice, it can really save a lot of code duplication. However, i find that in general, this only works with code that has been written with GWT in mind - using code that was not written with GWT in mind often doesn't work well. This is because GWT only has a subset of the classes in the JDK, and in javascript, you have to care about performance a lot more than you do on the server side. </li> <li>It aims to achieve the fastest javascript, faster than you would ever write by hand (because if you did write it by hand, the code would be unmaintainable). The unfortunate reality is that the browsers that a lot of people use have incredibly slow javascript engines, so the performance of your javascript code matters a lot. Gwt's compiler is a real optimizing compiler - it will inline methods, intern all your strings. devirtualize your method calls when possible, etc. Because you are compiling for each browser and locale, the compiler can also inline browser-specific and locale-specific code. This <a href="http://code.google.com/events/io/sessions/MeasureMillisecondsPerformanceTipsWebToolkit.html" rel="noreferrer">Google I/O presentation</a> has some benchmarks a few slides in.</li> <li>It will also automatically sprite your images together to minimize the number of http requests needed, again improving the speed of your site. GWT 2.0 will allow you to combine together arbitrary files.</li> <li>most of the files created by gwt have a strong hash as their filename, which lets you set the files to be cached forever, but not worry about people having old versions if the file changes</li> <li>The code splitting in GWT 2.0 is very impressive and would be very difficult to do by hand. As the size of your application grows, dealing with the size of your javascript matters more and more, and you need to be able to split it into chunks</li> <li>You are coding in a statically typed language. I know some people prefer dynamic typing, but i like to compare this debate to the emacs vs vi debate - there are a lot of smart people on both camps, and arguing on the internet isn't going to change anyone's preference</li> <li>You get to use a lot of the great tools that exist in the java ecosystem, which are generally a lot more mature than the equivilant javascript tools. - junit, java IDEs, java debuggers, refactoring, etc.</li> </ul>

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