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.

GWT 2.4 out

GWT 2.4 was just provided to the developpers yesterday ; below are the release notes
http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/doc/latest/ReleaseNotes.html
Not a big release in my opinion, but follows the new scheme to deliver more ofter production-ready versions.
This version is mainly dedicated to android and google apps.

GWT 1.7 out

It was quite surprising to me to discover this morning the V1.7 of GWT.
Here is the download link.
The release note says :
"(...)adds explicit support for Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.5, and Safari 4 as well as a few high-priority bug fixes. In all other respects, it is very similar to GWT 1.6. Note, however, that this release is version 1.7 rather than version 1.6.5 to signify a potentially breaking change for libraries that use deferred binding to specialize code based on user agent (see the next section for technical details)."

Google big knock

Google has gone a step forward yesterday by providing us yesterday with three main technology pepites, ie the delivery of GWT 1.6, the GWT eclipse pluggin working with it, and the App engine for java (up to now we have had App engine for Python).
With these three corner stones, Google is able to offer to developpers a complete framework for developping free or commercial solutions without having to think about the server performance, the data recovery, the deployement headaches, and so on... or just to make quickly mockups.
You can find further informations here :

• GWT 1.6
• GWT eclipse plugin
• App engine for java
  

GWT 1.6 RC2 available

The second release candidate of GWT1.6 is out and can be downloaded here :

"The GWT team is happy to announce the availability of Google Web Toolkit 1.6
RC2. Download it here:

http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit/downloads/list?q=1.6.3

For an overview of the new features in 1.6, please see the announcement:

http://googlewebtoolkit.blogspot.com/2009/03/google-web-toolkit-16-rc...

The only real difference from RC1 should be some fixes I made for the hosted
mode Jetty configuration issues that were reported with RC1:

http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit/issues/list?can=2&q=miles...

--Scott, on behalf of the GWT team "

We have just from now to wait for the conformance of external tools and libraries to work on it :-( .

GWT 1.6M1 and M2 released

GWT 1.6 Milestone 1 and 2 are out. The annoucement thread is available here. You will find soon a description of the new features here. The link for download.
Main new features :

• New Project Structure like the .war one
  
• Hosted Mode Enhancements (use of jetty instead of tomcat)
  
• New EventHandler System (generalized Handler system for every widgets)
  
• New Widgets (DatePicker,LazyPanel)

On another subject, you also may take a glance on the GWT blog to see that Google library for GWT has been updated.

GWT 1.6 Roadmap

Good news ; GWT 1.6 will be available for use in at most 3 months. Among the new features or improvements, we can notice the introduction of new events handlers instead of listeners (deprecated in the next version). We will have then a finer grain of beheviour on widgets.
But the post 1.6 features are very appealing ;) like :

• UI declarative format
• Developer Guided Code splitting
• Client Bundle

GWT is beginning to become quite mature and powerful.

GWT libraries news

• OFCGWT is a gwt library over OpenFlashChart2 enabling developpers to display very nice charts in flash while continuing programming in java, and especially with GWT.A demo can be found here.
• GWT Mosaic is a highly usable, feature rich toolkit for creating Rich Internet Applications and an easy to use API.
• gwt-rolodex : displays a stack of images that you can flick through like a rolodex or a card deck
• The FT-GWT-Library 0.9.6 realease is also nearly out. The Calendar widget is espceially useful and nice.
• The cobgw project offers some interesting widgets too.
• The LightboxImage widget is a wrapper onto the lightbox.js library. It is nice.
• GWT2SWF enables a flash component to communicate with GWT.
• htmltemplatewidget is a quite old project but can be interesting for some kinds of use where templating is needed.
• gwt-dnd is a library which can be used when we need to make drag and drop.
• gwt_log is useful for logging information when testing the application.
• tatami : gwt library over the dojo js framework
• gwt-google-api : to access google applications through gwt
• gwt-diagrams : to provide diagramming capabilities to gwt
• gwt-ent
  
• gwt-datepicker
• gwt-s3 : allow applications to call Amazon S3 online storage services.
• gwt-validation : for field validation
• gwt-fabridge : allows scripting Flex and Flash files (swf) from javascript. gwt-fabridge wraps FABridge for GWT. It extends gwt2swf.

That's all for today!