I just got into a project that uses GWT (in an attempt to rebuild it in React). Is it me or is Java development environment stuck in early 2000s?

GWT isn't a good thing to judge the language one. The thing is like 16 years old and it's barely still maintained. According to Wiki the last stable release was made in May 2020 and before that one the last one was in October 2017. You can't really expect much from a web project with a 2.5y release cycle.

If you really want to see how Java is used for web then Spring and Spring-boot I believe are still the cutting edge frameworks right now. And honestly nothing in the world will convince me that the endless nesting spaghetti that is TypeScript and React is better than Spring for Backend stuff. xD

@Hazarth It depends, I know react but have not worked much with java, if I where to build an app I might try react native rather than learning a new platform.

And for web development I am pretty sure react beats GWT :)

But I might also try xamarin using C#.

Or go all in with kotlin and swift and build real native apps. Sure you need to keep two code bases.

Flutter is the new hotness for mobile apps. Cross platform with Android and iOS, it can also be a website!

@Hazarth

How would you even use React for backend?

@msdsk isn't react part of the node (JavaScript everywhere) ecosystem? Or am I mixing things up? Afaik GWT is housing both BE and FE, so does Spring

@Hazarth its originally just a gui library for web but they later added react native for appdevelopment.

And I do not think it has anything to do with node.js as such, possibly if react native uses it but react for server side is only used for prerendering of pages so that you can get a faster first display, but since its built to work with the browser dom, outside of gui rendering I do not see much use ;)