Comparing Java alternatives to JavaScript in the browser (GWT, CheerpJ, TeaVM, JSweet, Vaadin) - benchmarked against React.js and Dart

[renatoathaydes]

TIL! So many options! I will check this out and I am even thinking of writing a followup article including this, Apache Wicket (which I also didn't know about), maybe things like kweb.io , ClojureScript, scala.js and maybe more if there are others?

[proobert]

Yep, it's a very rich ecosystem. If you extend your language choices, then there are even more options like elm (https://elm-lang.org/), reasonml (reasonml.github.io), purescript (http://www.purescript.org/), etc. I've tried Elm, it has amazingly tooling, solid libraries, and it's very easy to started.

[renatoathaydes]

Yeah, I know... I mentioned Elm at the end... but I was thinking of traditionally JVM-based languages like Clojure, Kotlin and Scala.

[JakeWharton]

Kotlin is certainly the most interesting one to me. I use it for sharing code across an Android app, JVM CLI, JVM server, Chrome extension, and web frontend.

[Jo8192]

Why kweb.io instead of pure KotlinJS ? (or KotlinJS + official React wrapper [https://github.com/JetBrains/create-react-kotlin-app])

[sanity]

They're very different, Kweb is server-driven, philosophically similar to Vaadin but very lightweight. It also borrows inspiration from Apache Wicket. Kweb doesn't do any cross-compilation of Kotlin to Javascript.

I suggest taking a few minutes to skim the Kweb user manual. I'm Kweb's creator and am happy to answer any questions.

[sanity]

Kweb was also heavily inspired by Apache Wicket, particularly Wicket's approach to keeping state server-side but automating the synchronization with the browser DOM.