[chadmaughan]

Super Dev Mode and Elemental (appear to) take away two of my big complaints with GWT.

The biggest still remains: pounding OO Java into a functional paradigm.

One of my favorite quotes (http://matt.might.usesthis.com/):

"One should always choose the programming language that reduces the impedance mismatch between a problem and its solution."

Java for rich web = impedance mismatch. We're in a polyglot world folks.

[cromwellian]

I'm not really sure OO vs functional is the real impedance mismatch. The big impedance mismatch is the fact that the browser is fundamentally asynchronous event model driven, and so a language without lexical closures makes event oriented programming overly verbose.

But stuff browser-APIs I don't feel mismatch either OO or functional style, and some of the IDLs behind the C++ browser APIs are explicitly OO type hierarchies. There's somewhat of an impedance mismatch between WebIDL and Javascript itself if you look at the language binding source.