Differences between GWT and Vaadin

Question

Can anyone suggest whether \"GWT\" or \"Vaadin\" are a better choice to design an application? Also: what are the differences in coding style?

Answer 1

GWT enables you to write web-clients with Java. The GWT cross-compiler creates JavaScript code for the client-side. You have to care for the server for your own as well as client-server communication. The generated client-code is already optimized for many browsers. My personal opinion is, GWT was very popular until Google focused on Angular. Today it is not much popular anymore.

Vaadin provides two different solutions: 1) a UI widget-set based implementing the web-component standard, and 2) the Vaadin serverside Java framework. It allows you to write web-clients with Java. However, Vaadin generates the web-client through runtime on the server dynamically. Vaadin cares for the entire client-server communication. For rendering the UI, Vaadin until version 8 used a pre-compiled UI widget-set. Vaadin from version 10 uses the Vaadin web-components.

Further benefits of Vaadin:

• You do not get in contact with HTML and JavaScript and you need not bother for DOM manipulation, browser history and other low-level problems
• The serverside architecture provides better security
• Modern themes
• Individual styling with CSS
• RapidClipse provides a powerful UI builder for Vaadin based on Eclipse containing a Vaadin <> JPA databinding, internationalization, UI persistence, extended Hibernate tools, JPA-SQL query language and MicroStream integration for creating Java in-memory database apps and microservices