The history of GWT was that it was started by Joel and Bruce and acquired by Google. Internally, at the time, Google had been using Closure Compiler and millions of lines of Javascript code, so just from inertia, there would not have been much use in the beginning, because it's not like the GMail team is going to rewrite GMail in GWT over night. Really, the first high profile consumer facing project done with GWT was Wave. AdWords is also GWT, but not very sexy.
I come from a background of using Maven to build my projects, and Google's internal build system is somewhat maven like, but it doesn't let you specify versions in dependencies, so you always end up depending on HEAD. To me, this is the root problem making it hard for projects that live simultaneously in the open and closed worlds.
It would be interesting to see how the Guice team handles it, but maybe they're patch velocity is small.
As for why GWT didn't get a huge external community of committers? I do think it has something to do with the fact that it is a gated community, that people feel like they don't "own" it, Google does. Maybe re-open sourcing it and rebranding it as "Open Web Toolkit" or "Community Web Toolkit" would somewhat remove those mental blocks.
I would love for the open community to be true owners of GWT, and Google as just a contributor. I've been lobbying to make it happen, and I hope it does. Too many external people have put in a lot of work, they deserve it.
I come from a background of using Maven to build my projects, and Google's internal build system is somewhat maven like, but it doesn't let you specify versions in dependencies, so you always end up depending on HEAD. To me, this is the root problem making it hard for projects that live simultaneously in the open and closed worlds.
It would be interesting to see how the Guice team handles it, but maybe they're patch velocity is small.
As for why GWT didn't get a huge external community of committers? I do think it has something to do with the fact that it is a gated community, that people feel like they don't "own" it, Google does. Maybe re-open sourcing it and rebranding it as "Open Web Toolkit" or "Community Web Toolkit" would somewhat remove those mental blocks.
I would love for the open community to be true owners of GWT, and Google as just a contributor. I've been lobbying to make it happen, and I hope it does. Too many external people have put in a lot of work, they deserve it.