i don't have a lot of experience with vanilla GWT, but i have been using vaadin a lot lately and it is very frustrating to look at the (bloated) html that vaadin generates and not to be able to do anything about it (without designing new widgetsets).
Also i have found with vaadin the client side rendering times can be a problem. ( though my whole team is new with vaadin so there's a good chance that that is our fault)
I definitely see the appeal of vaadin, but i think that ultimately its not the paradigm you want for web application development. I think that for many cases you really need to know exactly what will run on the client side and what will run on the server.
Back when i was doing lots of silverlight development there was a very clear division between the client side and server side code. However, because they were both implemented in the same language i was able to factor out shared components (models mostly) into seperate projects that i could individually compile for both sides (for smaller chunks of functionality such as some socket protocol validtion code i just linked the files into multiple projects). This allowed for good reuse as well as good seperation. I think that this is ultimately what you want: the ability to share some code between both sides not to blur the line completely.
Also i have found with vaadin the client side rendering times can be a problem. ( though my whole team is new with vaadin so there's a good chance that that is our fault)
I definitely see the appeal of vaadin, but i think that ultimately its not the paradigm you want for web application development. I think that for many cases you really need to know exactly what will run on the client side and what will run on the server.
Back when i was doing lots of silverlight development there was a very clear division between the client side and server side code. However, because they were both implemented in the same language i was able to factor out shared components (models mostly) into seperate projects that i could individually compile for both sides (for smaller chunks of functionality such as some socket protocol validtion code i just linked the files into multiple projects). This allowed for good reuse as well as good seperation. I think that this is ultimately what you want: the ability to share some code between both sides not to blur the line completely.