GWT in the Past and in the Future

The Google Web Toolkit was first released in 2006. It was created as a tool to help Google engineers develop their complex browser-based applications, such as AdWords, Google Wallet and Google Flights, and, more recently, is being used at the heart of Google Sheets and Inbox applications.

Back in 2006, browsers (and JavaScript interpreters) were far from standardized. Front-end code was slow, buggy and hard to use reliably. There was an almost total lack of high quality libraries and frameworks for web development. For instance, jQuery did not even exist until this year. So, to be able to develop large-scale web applications, the engineers at Google decided to leverage existing tools and competencies. Java was the best-suited language for their needs, being well known and perfectly integrated into IDEs, such as Eclipse, and so the Google Web Toolkit began its life.

The goal was more or less to hide the differences between browsers, and encapsulate the tricks needed to write efficient JavaScript inside a Java compiler, leaving the developers free from the tyranny of browser technicalities.

Of course, over the last decade, the web has changed; browsers have become faster and have converged on implementation standards, and a lot of awesome front-end frameworks and libraries have been developed, including jQuery, Angular, Polymer, and React. So the first question you might naturally ask is, “Is GWT still useful?”

In a word: Yes.

In the context of modern web development, targeting browsers is unavoidable and JavaScript has become the lingua franca of front-end applications. But of course, different tools and languages are better-suited to different tasks. GWT, along with a handful of similar projects aim to target browsers without confining developers to using JavaScript.

The development and employment of “compile-to-the-web” tools like GWT will, in the near future, be facilitated by the so called WebAssembly group of the World Wide Web Consortium. There is not only a vast space for tools that compile to JavaScript, but this approach may fill a real need in contexts that range from offloading part of computation to browsers, reusing existing code and libraries, sharing code between back-end and front-end, employing existing competences and workflows and leveraging features of different languages (for example, static typing in the case of GWT).

The GWT Project is expected to release version 2.8 soon, and version 3.0 is in development, with great improvements in the works:

• reinvented interoperability with JavaScript
• improved (almost totally rewritten) compiler
• state of the art Java support (e.g. lambdas)

Actually, most, of the features of GWT 3.0 are already available on the public Git repository. Just check out the trunk, here and compile GWT following the documentation here.