What's the best .Net counterpart of Google Web Toolkit?

Question

What's the best .Net counterpart of Google Web Toolkit? How can you compare both of technologies?

Answer 1

It's not released yet, but Volta is the .NET version of GWT. It started a few years behind GWT, and appears to be "unavailable" right now.

Apart from Volta, I don't think there's anything else that's similar to GWT (i.e., compiles C# or similar to Javascript).

Answer 2

I misunderstood the question, sorry.

http://www.nikhilk.net/ScriptSharpIntro.aspx

Script#, compiles C# into javascript. I haven't followed this project for awhile, so I'm not sure of the status of it. I believe it is released and works, and might have been used back when ASP.NET AJAX was in beta.

Answer 3

http://jsc.sourceforge.net/

Answer 4

Cool, didn't know that there exists tools doing .Net -> JavaScript "compilation".

However when I would have to develop a rich web client for .Net I'd probably go for Silverlight.

Regarding your question of how to compare both products...Well I actually don't understood clearly what you mean by compare. For deciding which one to use? I assume that was your issue. Well in such a case I would consider the following points:

• Cross browser compatibility of the produced outcome (the JavaScript source basically)
• Imposed language limitations that can be used: With GWT you can for instance just use a subset of Java.
• Ease of developing common scenarios (like communicating with the server, handling responses)

For considering them in an enterprise environment also things like language knowledge and reusability of existing components do matter. So if you mainly develop in .Net you'll probably go for that option since your developers have already a good knowledge of that framework.

Personally I've experimented a bit with GWT and it's really great in terms of performance and produced JavaScript. Also communicating with the server is a minor issue, using the GWT RPC mechanism.
Silverlight seems to be great too, however. The only possible drawback there is that your clients need to install a separate runtime environment.

Answer 5

IMHO the best GWT alternative in .NET is... GWT. Script# is really far from GWT.

You can definitely use GWT with .NET: I've published an example at www.cromoteca.com/en/blog/gwt-asp-net-proxy. I use NetBeans or Eclipse to write GWT code and Visual Studio for the server part. My example include a servlet proxy that connects the two development environments so that you can use GWT dev mode with the real server code written in ASP.NET. It's up to you to choose a data format to send data to the client, I chose JSON since it's already available in both .NET and GWT.