Impressions on Modern Java Web Browser Development with GWT

Dr. Lofi Dewanto
4 min readSep 22, 2020

We had a chance to use GWT in our internal Hackathon and here are our impressions and feedbacks for GWT / J2CL / Java development on the Web Browser.

The Task: build a simple UI frontend web app which just shows other web apps contents (micro frontends with HTML, JS). So it is just like building a portal (main frontend UI) with some portlets (micro frontends). If you don’t know what it is check out my article: From Portlets to OpenSocial Gadgets to Progressive Web Apps. We chose Material Design for the UI design.

The Team: we were four Java developers, one developer knows how GWT works and has done some stuffs in “old-style” GWT, one has also done small amount of GWT but very few, one has never done GWT but knows JavaScript and me who has some experiences in GWT.

Portal (Main Frontend UI) and Portlets (Micro Frontends)

Frameworks and libraries are developer’s best friend therefore it is important that they serve developers best way to write best apps. If you are building frameworks and libraries your customers are the developers. So it is clear that the “developers” need to like your product to make your product successful.

Here are our experiences using GWT to solve our task.

(1) GWT Boot is very nice and make the development of GWT web apps very easy to start. But all of the modules are still…

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