Flights is a bit thin on, hotelfinder is better but on my iPad here it's got that typical clunky google UI feel - and to be fair they aren't a design or GUI strong company - but it's clear they are making steps to address it.
Good point - Angry birds is an excellent counter example and fair use case for GWT. It's not what I'd call a GUI app - I was more thinking Forms, Document interaction (word, excel, illustrator, photoshop).
I see a strong use case for Java on GWT, emscripten et al for apps like games that are a universe to themselves, using a very narrow surface area (canvas, ogl) of the browser application interface.
Where these abstractions fall down for me is the friction at every interface interchange. In java case that's callback friction (brievity matters to me), the heavy burden of types on variables versus values, a verbose and inarticulate typing system, and like C/C++ and many Algol derivatives a complete paucity of expressive Literals for expressing all data types that can be modelled by the type system.
Good point - Angry birds is an excellent counter example and fair use case for GWT. It's not what I'd call a GUI app - I was more thinking Forms, Document interaction (word, excel, illustrator, photoshop).
I see a strong use case for Java on GWT, emscripten et al for apps like games that are a universe to themselves, using a very narrow surface area (canvas, ogl) of the browser application interface.
Where these abstractions fall down for me is the friction at every interface interchange. In java case that's callback friction (brievity matters to me), the heavy burden of types on variables versus values, a verbose and inarticulate typing system, and like C/C++ and many Algol derivatives a complete paucity of expressive Literals for expressing all data types that can be modelled by the type system.