Ask HN: What is the job-market like for a GWT (and GAE) expert?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3920426

by lost_aether • 14 years ago

8 4 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hi, I've always hated Javascript, so 5 years ago, I started investing in GWT as an escape to that . Given that my background was in "real" programming languages, GWT fits like a glove. I have found it very useful (and now GAE also), but I've been using it just for my projects at work or solo. I have no idea how much it is really used out there.

I'm therefore wondering if anyone knows what is the market like for GWT experts, especially - but not only - in Europe. Is it a skill in demand? A skill for which no one really cares?

jobmatchbox• 14 years ago

The only people who seem to use it here on the East Coast in the USA are government contractors and people who leave government contractors to go to work in the private sector.

kodablah• 14 years ago

You'll need to branch out. GWT hasn't jumped from 2.4 in a good while and doesn't appear to be focused on. Just compare the activity from GWT [1] to Dart [2]. I too like GWT, but it is dying. Try clojure-script if you really like the concept.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit/source/list [2] http://code.google.com/p/dart/source/list

lost_aether• 14 years ago

Well, DART is a far more recent project which alone can justify more activity when compared to a more stable project. Also, DART, despite being very interesting, has to be supported by the browsers and that will be hell. So, I think that's a bit too close to the bleeding edge to be useful in the enterprise environment.

georgemcbay• 14 years ago

"Also, DART, despite being very interesting, has to be supported by the browsers and that will be hell."

Dart compiles to JavaScript precisely to avoid this problem. And while Dart's JS target support is somewhat uneven among browsers, it has been improving and will continue to get better.

Quite a few of the people working on Dart were previously working on GWT, and the eventual end-game for Dart is to cover a lot of the same ground GWT did, but with a new (but familiar) language instead of Java.

Ask HN: What is the job-market like for a GWT (and GAE) expert?

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