I'm looking forward in seeing the videos of the presentations.

I am indeed thinking of having smaller applications. But these apps have to be consistent even if they are not all implemented with the same technologies. So some things will become Web Components or just JS objects with TypeScript definition but developed with GWT.

It is about personal interest if people chose a career path in backend development or UI development. Saying that learning GWT is just learning Java is clearly an understatement. Java is just the language and it allows you to share code with the backend as you mention - and that is great. 

But at runtime there is a huge difference. You cannot implement a large scale GWT based application unless you have a good understanding of the underlying platform it is running on.  Just like you can't implement a scallable backend with Java developers who don't understand threading, garbage collection, classloading, introspection, resource management, database technologies,  ... the skillset is obviously different.

Nope the question is: how will GWT win back public interest. 

As for going for your proposed solutions ... it does not sound like a convincing argument since we all know that most of these things will not be supported in the next major release. Staying on 2.8 for 10 years does not sound like a good idea. I'm not talking about porting a todo application but about porting an application with hundreds of non trivial screens.  It's not like we will be able to go from the 2.x branch to the 3.x branch on a screen per screen basis, it will be a major effort where everything will need to be ported.

My question is mostly about how will the GWT team win back public interest. I don't see it answered anywhere. The core team and steering comitee seems to be a bit disconnected from reality. This question has been asked by many people and like it or not it is an important factor in deciding what technologies to use for large scale applications.

Big companies who want to invest 100+ staff years projects want to have some confidence that the technology they use will adapt to future needs. Maybe you see that as irrelevant but in enterprise development it is an important consideration - obviously not the only one, but it is a factor. So if we chose GWT 2.8, we need to know what the path ahead looks like. 

The current message we get is not very nice: There will be a GWT 3.x but we haven't started on it yet oh and don't use anything except for a few basic features. I'm hoping that GwtCon will reveal some more concrete information on the direction.

As for seeing GWT development as just Java is clearly a misleading view. When you hire people with Java skills you expect that they know more than just how to write a class. They need to understand how to write a maintainable applications with clear design and understand multithreading, database technologies, J2ee related technologies.

The skillset for a good GWT developer is not really the same as for a Java developer. Such a developer needs to understand that he is working inside a browser with other technologies. There are no threads, not all Java api's are available. CSS and HTML is not something you can ignore (especially since Widgets will no longer be supported)... so the skillset is quite different. Writing APT is also an interesting aspect that is not well documented and also requires a different way of thinking. Java people are often using introspection for tasks that with GWT requires generators for example.

I won't be present at the conference otherwise I would have been glad to have a further chat about my reason for asking this question. The reason why I am probably also sounding a bit ranty is that I believe in many of the ideas behind GWT and I believe that 3.x will be a very good step forward (2.8 is already a major step, I really love the lambda support and JsInterop is nice as well).