Web Browser Programming in Java

As a long time Pascal and Java programmer I love the idea of compile time check from those languages. It saves me a lot of work in the runtime later. For sometime I enjoy writing apps in Java, client-side with Swing or SWT and server-side with Enhydra XMLC, Struts, Spring Framework, some HTML, CSS and JavaScript for web browsers. But as we all know the requirements are changing everyday. AJAX came in the year 2005 to play a big role and today web browsers — with JavaScript as its native language — are becoming the new platform.

In the picture below (History of Web Frameworks) you can see the movement from pure Java web development to JavaScript based framework like Angular, Vue.js and React.

History of Web Frameworks (Source: http://bit.ly/HistoryWebFrameworks)

So in the year of 2019 web development is entirely occupied by JavaScript or derivatives like TypeScript? Well, not entirely… One small village of indomitable Open Source Java developers still holds out against the invaders with the help of Java to JavaScript transpiler GWT (http://www.gwtproject.org) and J2CL (https://github.com/google/j2cl)

So the question for us as Java developers, should we just move to JavaScript and forget our beloved Java tooling and frameworks?

In this article I would like to show following simple thing:

1. How easy to implement a Java class with your standard tooling Eclipse or…