GWT roadmap

There were several nice sessions ar Google I/O, and especially for my own interest Go, cloud and GWT.

There was more especially a session about the future of GWT, done by Daniel Kurka, Ray Cromwell.

You may find the video here.

To summurize, we can say that GWT future is ensured from now, and having two talks at Google I/O two years after Google left officially the project is a good news.

Here are the key points which have been discussed :

• Openness: complete move to open source
• gwt steering commitee members allowed as direct commiters
• public continuous integration server / buildbot
• full mavenization
• regular, public steering committee meetings
• Simplicity
• disentangle dependencies, make gwt more modular
• reduce need for .gwt.xml files
• delete deprecated code
• Speed
• increase compile speed by 50%
• improve speed of SuperDevMode refresh
• continue to improve compiled code size
• improved code splitter
• tune js output for modern js vms
• better reporting and profiling tools to spot performances problems
• Interoperability
• java <-> javascript calls even easier to use
• improve support and integration with closure compiler
• support hybrid apps, compiling gwt code and external js together
• java 7 and 8 support (for lambda for instance)
• Mobility : is considered as more an more important
•  support modern mobile web browser
• mobile optimized widgets
• application life cycle and offline
• packaged apps
• Reliability
• close 100 of our top bugs
• improve speed and reliability of GWT unit testing
• deprecate older browser (ie 6-8)
• Embeddability

There is also a new website for the project : gwtproject.org where documentation is better classified and presentation more pleasant.

The new versions are planned for Q4 2013 (2.6) and Q2 2014 (3.0).

The question now is why am i still interested into the future of GWT, while I investigate into for instance Typescript and others? Just because until now it is still the best set of framework and tools to develop for the web IMO, excepting three things : compiling slowness, js interoperability, no lambda...  But the good news is that, after a survey on gwt made by vaadin, important decisions have been made to overpass these drawbacks... So, if companies involved into gwt still invest into this technology, we could see in a near future a very good universal framework for both classic and mobile web apps development.