[JamesXNelson]

Note that GWT 3 will see the birth of incremental compiler plus super dev mode, which will actually be FASTER than Dev Mode.

I don't know about you, but the dev-mode lag of jumping back and forth between browser and jvm actually makes dev mode painful to use, especially on very large projects that can take many seconds to reload fresh code.

As someone who does work a lot on raw js projects using GWT (including Collide, as mentioned by Ray), I can say I'm very happy to see widgets de-emphasized in favor of using html5 features, like web components.

When I'm building a view, I rarely care about a widget hierarchy; rather, I just want to construct some html, inject some css, and attach some event listeners.

Writing my business logic in java means I can share it with web, android and ios (via j2objc); for that web view, I'm building html, and rarely need the abstractions provided by widgets. If I do need widgets, I usually use a composite with ui binder so I can control the html myself anyway.