Hi Ronnie,
For me the benefit of GWT will be reduction in through life costs of an application. With GWT:
1) Write program once; it takes care of browser differences for me
2) Program is writen in a strongly typed language with substantial tool support
Whilst the first point can be addressed by other toolkits/frameworks, GWT is the only one the readily allows us to use powerful IDEs, and other tools such as
Ant and Maven.
Add these together with the ability to develop
unit tests with
JUnit, and all of a sudden the development environment of web applications becomes very similar to that for other solid development environments.
And where there is a solid development environment there is the opportunity for smarter, quicker (=cheaper) maintenance.
If we are serious about making web applications work, then through life costs will have to factor into the equation, and the more manageable my development the easier it is to make investement judgements etc and therefore theoretically the better/more functional my web applications could become.
Although this might perhaps sound a little "management" focussed, these issues are all valid as a developer, as anything that makes my life easier I find good for me!
This is not to say that you couldn't achieve something similar in just pure JavaScript, but you would be relying on "heros" in your team to deliver quality and reliability, and as applications get bigger these become harder to find / retain. There's a reason why we rarely write substantial applications in assembly code anymore.
//Adam
