yeah, we had internal debates whether to use gwt or just js, gwt side won and we (most of us!) do not regret it :)

This is a really stellar app and the compiled JS is quite small. You guys should present at the next GWT conference or I/O.

Wow, thanks for the awesome compliment!

if it's not too private, i'd like to hear about some of the details of the debate you had! What was the arguments against GWT? what was the arguments against pure js?

well, all the arguments are pretty standard :)

gwt pros: - java (excellent tooling, static typing, reliable refactoring) - code splitting and async loading (although we don't use it as much as we thought we would) - easy live debugging in devmode (will be gone soon) - rpc (although we switched to our own) - same model (java classes) on a client and on a server

but frankly most of it is basically java. we knew that the team will be 5-10 devs at least, we knew that the codebase will be big, so the java is obvious choice.

js pros: language a bit nicer (but it sucks anyway comparing to scala which is our server side :), better performance - no gwt wrappers/layers.