Lately I've been reading a lot of blog posts assailing a technology as though proponents of that technology think all other tools are useless in all situations.
Replace "GWT" and "JS" in this article with "C++" and "Assembly," and all of the points still hold. But C++ is still incredibly useful for many developers, and so is GWT.
GWT largely exists because it has a reason to exist. One of its main reasons to exist is that browsers are not standards compliant, and sometimes the standards are ill-defined. A well-defined abstraction layer on top of that is very useful... right up until it's not. Sometimes you need to dig in to Assembly, and sometimes you need to dig in to JS. But quite often, higher-level abstractions get you all the way from start to finish.
You know... It's in fact much more like the reverse: compiling assembly language into C. Java is a less expressive language than JavaScript. The result is that you code in the slow-to-develop/fast-to-run language and it spits out fast-to-develop/slow-to-run code.
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What is wrong with blog posts
Lately I've been reading a lot of blog posts assailing a technology as though proponents of that technology think all other tools are useless in all situations.
Replace "GWT" and "JS" in this article with "C++" and "Assembly," and all of the points still hold. But C++ is still incredibly useful for many developers, and so is GWT.
GWT largely exists because it has a reason to exist. One of its main reasons to exist is that browsers are not standards compliant, and sometimes the standards are ill-defined. A well-defined abstraction layer on top of that is very useful... right up until it's not. Sometimes you need to dig in to Assembly, and sometimes you need to dig in to JS. But quite often, higher-level abstractions get you all the way from start to finish.
Actually, my first thought when reading this blog post was "oh no, it's C vs. hand-tunes assembly again." We know, how that ended up.
You know... It's in fact much more like the reverse: compiling assembly language into C. Java is a less expressive language than JavaScript. The result is that you code in the slow-to-develop/fast-to-run language and it spits out fast-to-develop/slow-to-run code.