Back in the day, there were few javascript libraries and none of them could handle differences between browsers consistently. This was when people had to &quot;roll their own&quot; javascript, explicitly use xmlhttprequest (ajax) and web development was a pain in the ass.<p>People will laugh when I say this now, but for a time GWT was seen as an AWESOME alternative. The proposition that you could just write java and just have GWT shit out html and javascript for you was incredibly compelling.<p>... until you started using it!