GWT's Java binding is a bit outdated – it would have been better if it is a OO+functional language such as Scala, Groovy, Jython, JRuby or whatever JVM languages. How big a web project you have done with javascript? Why don't you try building an RIA-flavor enterprise application with hundreds of screens using HTML+javascript?

Cappuccino, taking an Objective-J binding (modeled after the Objective-C language), along with other platforms, such as, Titanium/Appcelerator, Echo2 and ZK etc, all share more or less the similar GWT philosophy of introducing new declarative constructs/expressions (you may call it “new language”), though they differ from each other in “server-centric” vs. “client-centric” kind of approaches. These approaches all exist for a good reason. With your claim of doing everything using plain HTML+javascript, then these technologies are all just a waste of time and non-sense.

It turns out, however, your posting is totally outdated, ignorant, without research ground and, non-sense, period.

The cross-browser support is a function of the libraries shipped with GWT. As noted above, if you’re including the GWT libraries you need to include other libraries such as jQueryUI and SproutCore which also include cross-browser support.

I think the issue of whether or not you’re duplicating your model on the client and on the server can go either way. Rather than fully duplicating the model on the client side, I’d rather be able to ask the server for a representation of the domain object POJOs that my client can understand (be it JSON, AMF, a POJO, whatever). It doesn’t need to understand the intricacies of the model; only the domain objects. Given the trend towards thicker clients, I personally see it as a fair tradeoff.

I do think there are some advantages to GWT provides over direct HTML and Javascript – built-in cross-browser support, javascript optimization (mini-fy, removing unused code), compile time checking and type-safety (this is also a downside due to slowing down performance and limiting some of the cool prototypical features of JS). Also, it provides a nice way to avoid duplicating your model on the serverside (java pojos) and client-side (javascript objects). It appears to have very good unit testing that hooks easily into automated builds. Java tooling seems to be pretty far ahead of Javascript tooling when you look at refactoring, code analysis, etc. (Of course you might try to argue that javascript is so easy you don’t need a big heavy IDE.)

Anyway, thanks for your analysis. I think you bring up a lot of good points about GWT and it is clearly not right for every project.