title: To what extent does a successful GWT developer need to be a fully fledged 'web developer'?
body: <ul>
  <li>By 'web developer' I mean a software developer having a sound
  understanding of web fundamentals (HTTP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript and
  Ajax).</li>
  <li>By 'successful GWT developer' I mean someone who can produce
  high quality and polished looking GWT apps in timely fashion.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>My department is gearing-up for a project that will require the development of a number of single screen RIA web apps. These will front enterprise server components implemented in Java. Our UI prototype was developed using <a href="http://www.sencha.com/products/extjs/" rel="nofollow">ExtJS</a> and was successful (in terms of speed of development and producing a professional, polished looking UI that integartes well with a service oriented API implemented using <a href="http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/2.0.x/reference/mvc.html" rel="nofollow">Spring-MVC</a> + <a href="http://jackson.codehaus.org/" rel="nofollow">Jackson</a>). However, in gearing-up to develop the actual product we have realised that our department's skills profile isn't ideal for ExtJS. We are strong on Java but relatively weak on web developers. The development of the UI prototype demonstrated that you really need fully feldged web developers to get to grips with ExtJS, since they will spend a significant amount of time grappling with CSS and JavaScript issues. As a result, the question has arisen as to whether we might be better off going with GWT (combined with a library that offers a level of polish comparable to ExtJS, such as <a href="http://www.smartclient.com/product/smartgwt.jsp" rel="nofollow">SmartGWT</a>). Obviously this assumes that GWT is significantly less demanding in terms of web development skills. To what extent would GWT + SmartGWT allow our Java developers to crank out high quality RIAs without them having to acquire anything more than a basic appreciation of the web fundamentals listed above?</p>
  
  <p>If we decide to explore GWT further we'll do another prototype, but in the mean time it would be very interesting to hear the opinions of experienced GWT developers.</p>