another GWT example – BrightPages.com

“We recently ported the site http://brightpages.com from Struts to GWT. As others have experienced, we had quite a ride porting to GWT framework. Being a public website, we have had to deal with issues like making the site accessible to crawlers and minimize the network traffic. We still have some UI bits rendered from server as GWT’s dynamic UI is not crawlable. But most of the interactive bits turned out good with GWT.

The other issue we dealt with is the size of the javascript output by GWT. The way we got around it using deferred binding to output different JS per page and in some cases, per use case, while using the same GWT module. This bought the size of the uncompressed JS from over 400kb to less than 27kb. I know that the JS is cached by the browser, but the delay in first-time hit was not acceptable.

We tried to switch to GWT 1.5 but the compile time was making the process prohibitive. Looking forward to the final release of 1.5 and the community feedback.”