GWT 2.5 RC is here

I'm not really sure OO vs functional is the real impedance mismatch. The big impedance mismatch is the fact that the browser is fundamentally asynchronous event model driven, and so a language without lexical closures makes event oriented programming overly verbose.

But stuff browser-APIs I don't feel mismatch either OO or functional style, and some of the IDLs behind the C++ browser APIs are explicitly OO type hierarchies. There's somewhat of an impedance mismatch between WebIDL and Javascript itself if you look at the language binding source.

You can have 1 permutation in GWT if you want, you'll have to choose either

1) dropping support for older browsers like IE6/IE8/Firefox 3.

2) using Soft Permutations (also known as capability checks in the JS work). GWT can automatically collapse permutations into capability checks. The downside is increase of JS code size.

Dart won't really solve this issue, but it more likely that it will just target modern browsers.

With GWT 2.5 and Elemental, you can drop back to HTML5 browsers only and use only 1 permutation.

There originally more Steering Members who were going to talk about what contributions they were going to make, but some couldn't make it. So I used the extra time to let Sencha and Vaadin talk about what they do. Since they are investing heavily in GWT, hiring additional people to work on it, offering commercial support, and now contributing code to it, I thought it only fair to let them talk about their products, some of which are quite good.