Overview

React

Stacks182.6K

Followers147.0K

Votes4.1K

GitHub Stars240.3K

Forks49.7K

GWT

Stacks88

Followers100

Votes0

GWT vs React: What are the differences?

Introduction

GWT (Google Web Toolkit) and React are both popular frameworks used for building web applications. While they serve similar purposes, there are key differences between the two.

Language: GWT allows developers to write client-side web applications in Java, which is then compiled into optimized JavaScript. On the other hand, React is based on JavaScript and uses JSX (a syntax extension) to define components.
DOM Manipulation: GWT manages the DOM (Document Object Model) directly, allowing developers to manipulate it directly through Java code. React, however, takes a virtual DOM approach where it creates a lightweight representation of the actual DOM, making it more efficient for updating and rendering changes.
Component-Based Development: React emphasizes a component-based development approach, where functionality and UI are divided into reusable components. GWT also supports component-based development, but its approach is not as explicit and can be less intuitive compared to React.
Performance: React is known for its performance optimization techniques, such as diffing and batching updates to minimize unnecessary re-rendering of components. GWT, while powerful, may require more manual optimization to achieve similar performance.
Community and Ecosystem: React has a larger and more active community with a vast ecosystem of libraries, tools, and resources. GWT, although still popular, has a smaller community and a more limited set of libraries and resources available.
Learning Curve: GWT may have a steeper learning curve, especially for developers who are not familiar with Java. React, being JavaScript-based and having a more explicit component-based approach, may be easier to learn and work with for many developers.

In summary, GWT and React differ in the language used, DOM manipulation approach, development approach, performance optimization techniques, community and ecosystem support, and the learning curve required.

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Advice on React, GWT

Cyrus

Aug 15, 2019

Needs adviceon

Vue.js

React

I find using Vue.js to be easier (more concise / less boilerplate) and more intuitive than writing React. However, there are a lot more readily available React components that I can just plug into my projects. I'm debating whether to use Vue.js or React for an upcoming project that I'm going to use to help teach a friend how to build an interactive frontend. Which would you recommend I use?

884k views884k

Comments

Cyrus

Aug 15, 2019

Needs advice

Simple datepickers are cumbersome. For such a simple data input, I feel like it takes far too much effort. Ideally, the native input[type="date"] would just work like it does on FF and Chrome, but Safari and Edge don't handle it properly. So I'm left either having a diverging experience based on the browser or I need to choose a library to implement a datepicker since users aren't good at inputing formatted strings.

For React alone there are tons of examples to use https://reactjsexample.com/tag/date/. And then of course there's the bootstrap datepicker (https://bootstrap-datepicker.readthedocs.io/en/latest/), jQueryUI calendar picker, https://github.com/flatpickr/flatpickr, and many more.

How do you recommend going about handling date and time inputs? And then there's always moment.js, but I've observed some users getting stuck when presented with a blank text field. I'm curious to hear what's worked well for people...

401k views401k

Comments

Malek

Web developer at Quicktext

Mar 28, 2020

Decided

The project is a web gadget previously made using vanilla script and JQuery, It is a part of the "Quicktext" platform and offers an in-app live & customizable messaging widget. We made that remake with React eco-system and Typescript and we're so far happy with results. We gained tons of TS features, React scaling & re-usabilities capabilities and much more!

What do you think?

244k views244k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

React	GWT
Lots of people use React as the V in MVC. Since React makes no assumptions about the rest of your technology stack, it's easy to try it out on a small feature in an existing project.	It is a development toolkit for building and optimizing complex browser-based applications. Its goal is to enable productive development of high-performance web applications without the developer having to be an expert in browser quirks, XMLHttpRequest, and JavaScript.
Declarative; Component-based; Learn once, write anywhere	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars 240.3K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 49.7K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 182.6K	Stacks 88
Followers 147.0K	Followers 100
Votes 4.1K	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 837 Components 674 Virtual dom 579 Performance 509 Simplicity 442 Composable Cons 41 Requires discipline to keep architecture organized 30 No predefined way to structure your app 29 Need to be familiar with lots of third party packages 13 JSX 10 Not enterprise friendly	No community feedback yet

What are some alternatives to React, GWT?

jQuery

jQuery is a cross-platform JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML.

AngularJS

AngularJS lets you write client-side web applications as if you had a smarter browser. It lets you use good old HTML (or HAML, Jade and friends!) as your template language and lets you extend HTML’s syntax to express your application’s components clearly and succinctly. It automatically synchronizes data from your UI (view) with your JavaScript objects (model) through 2-way data binding.

Vue.js

It is a library for building interactive web interfaces. It provides data-reactive components with a simple and flexible API.

jQuery UI

Whether you're building highly interactive web applications or you just need to add a date picker to a form control, jQuery UI is the perfect choice.

Ember.js

A JavaScript framework that does all of the heavy lifting that you'd normally have to do by hand. There are tasks that are common to every web app; It does those things for you, so you can focus on building killer features and UI.

Backbone.js

Backbone supplies structure to JavaScript-heavy applications by providing models key-value binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions, views with declarative event handling, and connects it all to your existing application over a RESTful JSON interface.

Svelte

If you've ever built a JavaScript application, the chances are you've encountered – or at least heard of – frameworks like React, Angular, Vue and Ractive. Like Svelte, these tools all share a goal of making it easy to build slick interactive user interfaces. Rather than interpreting your application code at run time, your app is converted into ideal JavaScript at build time. That means you don't pay the performance cost of the framework's abstractions, or incur a penalty when your app first loads.

Angular

It is a TypeScript-based open-source web application framework. It is a development platform for building mobile and desktop web applications.

Aurelia

Aurelia is a next generation JavaScript client framework that leverages simple conventions to empower your creativity.

Flux

Flux is the application architecture that Facebook uses for building client-side web applications. It complements React's composable view components by utilizing a unidirectional data flow. It's more of a pattern rather than a formal framework, and you can start using Flux immediately without a lot of new code.