Well, to be fair to GWT -- I know the guys who developed GWT, and they are really smart people who just didn't like having the client/server language distinctio

Well, to be fair to GWT -- I know the guys who developed GWT, and they are really smart people who just didn't like having the client/server language distinction, and who believed that type-unsafe languages suck for programming, and who wanted to use Java IDE tools to debug client-side issues, etc. etc. They were and are very smart JS developers, for obvious reasons -- they write the infrastructure that supports GWT in raw JS, at least initially. However, internally, at least at my project, they liked GWT because they thought it would liberate them from Javascript. Slightly different focus there.