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Google web toolkit was released 18 yers ago that essentially allowed you to create early web2.0 apps (like Gmail) in Java. AJAX and a lot of web2.0 innovations

• gf000 2y ago
  I would even argue that large scale JS web apps were plain impossible without Google Closure (the compiler they used to compile both Java and JS to JS, and to add types to JS) at the time.
• cogman10 2y ago
  Arguably, GWT was too ambitious. That made it somewhat of a PITA to work with. J2CL is a much better approach (IMO) but is somewhat too little too late. The best analogy to what GWT was is ASP.NET Webforms but ran on the client. That extra baggage (along with an antiquated build system and setup) made it really hard to keep GWT up to date. I'm excited to see Java bytecode->WASM though. Now that WASM ships with a GC we should see some really neat stuff in terms of the size of the runtime needed for an AOT bytecode->wasm.