Somehow your point got lost when you use GWT as an example.
Alright, it's time to explain the whole situation one more time (sigh).
GWT is a platform people. It has tons of goodies from doing the CSS sprites without having to write a home-grown CSS sprites merge scripts up until optimizing JS code.
Any developers that don't know their stack is limited to write high quality code, regardless you use GWT or pure JS (don't give me crap that front-end developers worth their salt without pulling the "yeah, only the best ones").
I used to code in GWT and we all need to know DOM API, we all need to know CSS. But we don't need to know the various "Object Pattern" in JS. We don't need to re-invent the module system in JS (we use Java package).
The difference is that we can write testable code via unit-tests that we can run automatically using JUnit, integrated to our build systems, without having to jump through hoops and prepare a full-blown infrastructure like those that required by Selenium or WebDriver.
Alright, it's time to explain the whole situation one more time (sigh).
GWT is a platform people. It has tons of goodies from doing the CSS sprites without having to write a home-grown CSS sprites merge scripts up until optimizing JS code.
Any developers that don't know their stack is limited to write high quality code, regardless you use GWT or pure JS (don't give me crap that front-end developers worth their salt without pulling the "yeah, only the best ones").
I used to code in GWT and we all need to know DOM API, we all need to know CSS. But we don't need to know the various "Object Pattern" in JS. We don't need to re-invent the module system in JS (we use Java package).
The difference is that we can write testable code via unit-tests that we can run automatically using JUnit, integrated to our build systems, without having to jump through hoops and prepare a full-blown infrastructure like those that required by Selenium or WebDriver.