[pamelafox]

Hm, I didn't work on the frontend but I don't particularly remember griping..GWT had been around for ~5 years at that point, so it wasn't super new: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Toolkit

I always personally found it a bit odd, as I preferred straight JS myself, but large companies have to pick some sort of framework for websites, and Google already used Java a fair bit.