[benmccann]

I can't speak for others, but I hated it. The people I know who liked it were the ones who were scared of JS because they didn't know it very well. The problem with GWT is that if you want to do anything semi-complicated you end up needing to write native JS anyway. So you end up with an ugly cludge of an app written in two different languages and cobbled together with a JNI-like mechanism. I also had a ton of trouble getting their funky debugger to work correctly. Writing in Closure is soooo much nicer. The Closure compiler can give you type safety, which seems to be about the only benefit of GWT.

[beermann]

Regarding the debugging features, I think things have gotten a lot better. Debugging is done in Eclipse and you're debugging java, not javascript (if that wasn't clear to some). It honestly works really well. I think there are also quite a few benefits other than type-safety. Easy implementation of asynchronous calls that serialize Java objects is one example.

GWT does have its drawbacks, but we do a lot of complex work in it with very minimal native javascript and support a site with hundreds of thousands of active users.