I concur. I've lately switched away from GWT/GAE to something more like rails/jquery hybrid.
GWT does have some nice things to it, but I think in the grand scheme of things, the best part of it is the separation between server/client, and the forcing function of having to do rendering on the client, where it should be done in the first place.
With jquery, tho, you can achieve a very similar effect .. just have a div with an id and convert it to widget in one line. There are far more , and much more well written widgets on jquery, than on gwt. It is a little more work, but I think it is well worth it.
GWT does have some nice things to it, but I think in the grand scheme of things, the best part of it is the separation between server/client, and the forcing function of having to do rendering on the client, where it should be done in the first place.
With jquery, tho, you can achieve a very similar effect .. just have a div with an id and convert it to widget in one line. There are far more , and much more well written widgets on jquery, than on gwt. It is a little more work, but I think it is well worth it.