[Ygor]

It depends. For someone who has no experience with html/css layouts, and has the ability to build his own design from scratch, creating the layout in code might seem simpler. The reason: it feels similar to creating desktop app layouts (i.e. Swing). And you don't have to worry about cross-browser stuff (in theory).

Also, You can now use GWT Designer, an Eclipse plugin that lets you build UIs graphically.

On the other hand, if you are a familiar with html and css layouts, this all might seem like a big mess, and too much work to do something simple. And you will not like the generated code (many many tables, often).

That's why they created GWT's UIBinder. You can use a html-like code to design the UI. This is much easier than making all the panel.add(widget) stuff in code. And it is a nice compromise, because your front-end designers will understand it. The big downfall is that it needs to be compiled to view the results, and believe me, this can be a cumbersome task.

I have been using it in the scenario where we get all the html and css from the designer, along with the jquery to add some effects. It wasn't easy porting the whole (working!) design to something usable by GWT. But, in the end we got the GWT to generate exactly the same markup.

All in all, there's no such thing as a free lunch.