GWT definitely deserves a better reputation than it has. I use and enjoy tools like React, Webpack, and friends. They make for a pleasant development experienc

GWT definitely deserves a better reputation than it has. I use and enjoy tools like React, Webpack, and friends. They make for a pleasant development experience. I do find it mildly amusing when people get excited about things like code splitting and dead code elimination in Webpack, though. Those things were pretty cool to see in GWT....in 2009. :) I remember it being pretty decent for plain HTML and CSS, too. I worked on a fairly big app and we didn't really use any of the build in widgets - mostly just HTML and CSS with UiBinder templates. GWT is definitely showing its age in some ways now, but for those of us who had to make single page apps in 2009/2010, it wasn't a bad way to get things done. I've seen some GWT apps whose codebases were disorganized horror shows. The main GWT app I worked on was quite nice - small, self contained components, all communicating asynchronously via an event bus that was passed in via dependency injection. It actually felt really, really similar to the way an Angular 2/4+ app does now. Overall, though, I try not to grump about the fact that mainstream front end development is rediscovering some of the good things GWT pioneered in this space. The more accessible front end development tools are, the better off we all are.