Yes. Google released an Eclipse plugin which helps you write setup the toolkit and start developing applications in no time. GWT also comes with an in build ser

Yes. Google released an Eclipse plugin which helps you write setup the toolkit and start developing applications in no time. GWT also comes with an in build server which lets you test run your Client side code with complete debugging facilities of Eclipse/Java. I agree that Firebug is a good tool, but I just can't replace Eclipse with FF/Firebug. The complete backend can be coded in Java. This of course you can debug even after you have compiled the entire front end of pure JS. GWT also provides some useful data modeling techniques to exchange data between the server and client (basically an abstraction over AJAX). I used to dislike the earlier versions of GWT because of its dependency on Java 1.2 and not being able to support the higher versions, but the current versions seamlessly compile Java 1.6 code and its awesome.