[epistasis]

I'm not a front end engineer, but it always seemed crazy to me. I remember testing out the Google Web Toolkit when it came out more than a decade ago, and the craziest thing about it to me wasn't the Java --> JavaScript compilation, it was that the server just dumped an empty page and filled everything in with JavaScript on the client.

Then, remember the awful awful #! URLs? Atrocious, and seemed like obviously a terrible idea from the start, yet they spread, and have mostly died, thankfully. But even with the lessons from these bad tech designs, new frameworks come out that repeat mistakes, yet get incredible hype.

[filmor]

Hashbang URLs are gone because of the PushState API, not because people have given up on the idea.

[epistasis]

Hashbangs preclude even the option of the server even seeing the state that the client wants from the first request, necessitating severa hops. PushState, though it allows URL transitions without a full reload, is an entirely better and different idea.

[mruniverse]

Around the time that GWT came out, offshoring was a big thing. And most of the contractors only knew Java. Also Java was the trusted language and javascript was not.

[bryanrasmussen]

The only big GWT project I've ever been on was a governmental project that I won't go into (because it's Danish and I would have to describe a bunch of stuff that everyone in Denmark knows and nobody outside would probably care about), but the company providing it was porting their Java version to JavaScript and had a significantly large codebase to leverage.

[Twirrim]

AWS used to rely on JWT for their consoles (haven't for a few years now, most folks migrated away some 5 years ago)

It's why they used to be horrendously bloated with large javascript bundles that took so long to process on the client side.

Roughly speaking the idea was "We don't have any Javascript developers, but we do have Java developers. JWT allows us to bridge that divide". Neat in theory, and an understandable decision, but diabolical in practice!

[solarengineer]

I believe you mean “GWT” and not “JWT”.

[Twirrim]

Yup you're right, that was quite a brainfart :)