A Peek at Google Web Toolkit

So I’m looking over this Google Web Toolkit thing since someone around here thinks it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.  I hate to disappoint but it’s conceptually the same as the much-hated ASP.NET WebForms - it’s a framework to abstract HTML and Javascript away from the programmer.  But instead of .NET and Visual Studio, Google’s version is based on Java and Eclipse.

Unfortunately this abstraction is pretty much exactly what I’m getting tired of in ASP.NET.  Microsoft went to great lengths to build this huge Web Forms framework to try to make HTML development look exactly the same as Windows Forms development, and I think there’s a growing body of evidence to support the assertion that it was a mistake (hence ASP.NET MVC).

So, not to be outdone, Google built this Web Toolkit to make HTML look like X-Windows widgets.  Deja vu.

So setting aside philosophy and getting into practicalities, the first thing I’m noticing about GWT is that there doesn’t seem to be any way to build an interface declaratively.  All the examples in the Showcase build things programmatically.  That harkens back to the early 90s when it took a thousand lines of code just to make one little gadget on the screen.  (Not to mention the inability to separate designers and programmers on the same project.)

Second thing I’m noticing (which is related to the first) is the almost 100% reliance on Javascript for the finished product.  The HTML host page is basically empty except for a