That was also my experience. GWT is really fantastic, especially because it is free and you can use it in the way you decide. For example, you can have server code in any language you chose..

..allows for debugging via Eclipse.

GWT is a quite solid environment and "feels" very much like common Java GUI development. But yeah, Java is quite strongly typed... Removing all the hassle of application deployment (== registry mess, DLL hell) is indeed a rational goal to go after.

..everybody uses statically typed languages. Aerospace, Medical instruments - code can kill people. That's why statically typed languages such as Ada are used.

..or thousands of other American corporations who critically depend on worldwide, cross-border business being possible. Then your job is on the line when protectionism is being set up.
Germany and South Korea actually do quite well in international trade. We don't abuse workers, have excellent healthcare and pay proper wages. Maybe this is a specific problem of America and England not using their brains when it comes to worker education and proper regulation of financial markets ? The southern Euro suckers can be dropped in one bag with UK-USA. Poland, Finland, Denmark are doing quite well with international trade, thank you very much.

A) Driving heavy cars over long distances every day and B) Having shitty housing isolation.

Healthcare costs and tons of regulative papers that prevent an employee to be killed by boredom in the toilet.

All those vocal Anglosaxon Crap Economists will write tons of papers which claim that one dollar of revenue from sandwich-making is as good as one dollar made from a car or measurement instrument.
That is, because their Finance Paymasters see those sandwiches every day when they take a break from their insane money-manipulations. They never see Industrial Robots in Canary Wharf or the NY finance district. So, Sandwiches are KEY FACILITATORS to the WORLD ECONOMY ! Everything would break down without a continuous supply of sandwiches ! Not just collateral-debt-obilgations, BUT THE WHOLE CASINO would stop !!
Never mind you can change German cars cars against Arab oil, but they don't want your sandwiches because they don't taste after being shipped for three weeks. Sandwiches and cars are wholly the same, proven by Anglosaxon idiots, I mean "Economists".

The difference is quite simple, Americans and Britons think it is "all about money". At least they did in the auto industry. In Germany, there is more than money involved in the car business. Boys become engineers because there is a long tradition of craftsmanship, because their fathers show them all sorts of ancient and current locomotives, aircraft and so on. VW's long-term CEO Ferdinand Piech has an aeronautical engineering degree, which is much harder than mechanical engineering. So he has the best education you can get on earth for making cars (and many other machines). Compare that to the GM CEOs, who are all Master-Beancounters. Their cars are consequentially crap and rational buyers go for German or Japanese cars, even if their purchase cost is higher. TCO will certainly be better, as VW cars normally just don't break (except for regular wear and tear).

I am a software developer (C++) and I don't need any mobile phone. Before I had a dumbphone until it broke. I take the train/bus to work and back. We have a car to move the food to our home and for leisure activities. We could even do without a car, I guess. Taxis might actually be cheaper, if you add up all the costs. I am living and working in Germany.

I worked for a financial data dissemination company and they officially had "business continuity" plans to handle things like "building burns down with some critical computers".
In REALITY, there was very little redundancy and an actual disaster event would have eliminated a lot of services for many customers. It was just "too expensive" and nobody in the management circles attempted to do anything except hand-wringing. "Oh, we should do something, BUT IT IS SOO EXPENSIVE" and "we cannot tell the customers". Just buying redundant x86 servers was too expensive.
But I also know that most real-world customers are dumb fucks (Mr Zuckerberg coined that term) who do not want to hear the truth.

You are American and you call Chinese businesspeople "cleptocrats" ?? Now whatabout the CEO of Lehman Brothers ? He must then be part of the Sicilian Mafia, in your classification of criminals. I have Secret Intelligence for you: Mr Fuld did not even sit for a single day in jail. Maybe you Americans get your ass out of your head and clean up that shithole called "New York", because this place is killing your economy. It is not China, even if that nicely meshes with your deep-running belligerent instincts. Free advice from Germany, no Chinese relation whatsoever, except that the cars we build are selling in record numbers in China, because they are high quality, high priced.

All the Java is non-essential for standard tasks. You only need it for Java-based macros.

They have become cynical people who essentially care about Money first, Money second and Money third. All what facilitates the nice inflow of money is being done. Security - it only costs money and it will never generate revenue. The cost of your corporate secrets being exfiltrated to an asian competitor - who cares. There is no way beancounters can properly account cost for that, so it is assumed to be zero, by means of ignorance. The western world has grown into a morally rotten bunch of muppets, pretty much like it was in the 1920s. Let's see what follows.

makes me think you Ma is 100% rational. People doing sysadmin, database development and other operations roles for a major CC acquirer would run XP. Everybody would be Admin user 100% of time. They had direct access to Oracle databases, could edit Perl scripts, kill processes etc etc. Of course they would surf the web with the same user accounts. Not in Buttfuckistan, but in a major european economy, an economy so strong all the suckers next to it want a share of it's wealth.