UPDATE: More recent post Out with Flextable and in with FlowPanel for the designer where I point out the downside of trying to design with FlexTable.
Compared to YUI's Datatable GWT FlexTable is so much easier to work with.
I spent a couple months developing in YUI2 which I generally had a great experience developing it in. At times I felt it was a bit slow but batteries are included and could get a prototype built fast! Also I love that it is just Javascript code so it seems very potable and easy for other developers. Since I have been writing Android apps and Java is one of my first loves (all those twice bitten) GWT has not been difficult for me. Most recently working with FlexTable I have learned where GWT has a great advantage over YUI2.
I was trying to find out how to hook up mouse events on a table of data when I ran into the exact example I needed on stackoverflow. This was a cleaner and easier implementation for mouse events in GWT than in YUI. I have found this to be generally true that GWT much easier to organize the code base in for large projects. I still feel simple user interfaces are better off with something like jQuery and that GWT is on the other end of the spectrum with really large complex user interfaces.
Rendering and entire page seems slow to me now. AJAX interfaces are raising the bar for us web developers. No longer can we just cache pages in memcache and expect them to be fast. Render time is like 70% of the user waiting for the page to load. That is the new true measurement of performance.
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