You should not use GWT

I have done some development with GWT in the past. It felt pretty natural to me as a Java developer, but I would not choose it anymore. The primary benefit of GWT was, I could use Java instead of JavaScript to do web development. But replacing a language made for the web with a laguage forcing you to write all this useless boilerplate code is not a solution.

GWT abstracts the web and the browser in a way similar to JSF and other frameworks I would not recommend. Instead I would choose some technology embracing the web. Doing pure JavaScript is the best way to be close enough to the browser.

If you do not like JavaScript’s syntax, you should try CoffeeScript or even LispyScript but not Java. From a Java developers point of view, this might be a hard topic. You know your IDE and neither CoffeScript nor JavaScript integrate as well into it as Java does. But it is never to late to learn programming without a walker.