Differences between GWT and Vaadin

Question

Can anyone suggest whether \"GWT\" or \"Vaadin\" are a better choice to design an application? Also: what are the differences in coding style?

Answer 1

A few more points:

• A fundamental difference is that in GWT you have to separate your application into Client and Server code, no such distinction in Vaadin. This will affect the architecture of your application.

• In GWT client code, you must code in Java, and have a limited subset of language features available (that the GWT compiler can translate into Javascript). In Vaadin, you can code in any JVM language, since everything runs in the server (I'm using Vaadin with Scala). This may or may not be relevant to you.

• GWT compilation is VERY slow, although in development mode you have the emulator. This makes production environment updates painful (a GWT application I developed has grown pretty big, and currently takes around 15 minutes to compile).

• It's very simple to extend GWT with 3rd party widgets, or roll your own. Creating new Vaadin widgets is more complex.