You're missing the value of having the same language for both client and server. If you have some code that you want to run both in the browser and on a server,

You're missing the value of having the same language for both client and server. If you have some code that you want to run both in the browser and on a server, GWT lets you write that in Java. Unless you write server-side javascript you can't do this in pure JS. (Too bad appjet is shutting down.)