Does it make sense to use Google Web Toolkit (GWT) as a full-blown Java web framework?

Question

I am interested in the possibility that GWT could serve as the basis for my entire presentation layer.

I would be interested to know if anyone has tried this successful

Answer 1

We have developed a large HR Portal application with the whole presentation layer done in GWT. The backend is Spring. It all works very well and the UI has been very well received by users. Very importantly it is easy for us to add new functionality and maintain the application. I think it would be much harder to do something comparable and maintainable using Javascript libraries.

You do need some sort of client side framework or you will end up writing one (as we did!): Our app is built on GWT Portlets (free and open source).

We use HTML fragments for skinning the app for different deployments and the layout of each "page" is stored in an XML file.