I think there's quite a wide gulf between "direct DOM manipulation" and "use GWT". I've been using Backbone's views to make my JS more manageable, for example,

I think there's quite a wide gulf between "direct DOM manipulation" and "use GWT". I've been using Backbone's views to make my JS more manageable, for example, and there are some nice MVVM frameworks out there that really help you build complex JS applications without it turning into spaghetti.