If you missed The Ajax Experience conference back in October, you can still catch Bruce Johnson's talk online, thanks to TheServerSide.com. In this talk, Bruce discusses Google Web Toolkit's performance and interoperability; it's a great introduction to GWT with lots of demos and sample code.Read More

If you missed The Ajax Experience conference back in October, you can still catch Bruce Johnson's talk online, thanks to TheServerSide.com. In this talk, Bruce discusses Google Web Toolkit's performance and interoperability; it's a great introduction to GWT with lots of demos and sample code.

After a couple weeks of fixing all the issues our developer community has so diligently reported in the issue tracker, we are happy to announce the official release of ...Read More

After a couple weeks of fixing all the issues our developer community has so diligently reported in the issue tracker, we are happy to announce the official release of Google Web Toolkit 1.2 today.

As we mentioned when we released the 1.2 Release Candidate, you can now develop and debug with GWT on Mac OS X in addition to Linux and Windows. We are pretty proud of this particular feature because GWT is now about as "platform independent" as you can get: develop on Windows, Linux or Mac OS X and deploy to IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera on any platform, without any special cases in your code. (If you want a bit more detail about our implementation of Mac OS X support, our release nomenclature and other tidbits, this recent InfoQ interview may interest you.)

We also have already talked about how much faster the 1.2 hosted mode debugging environment is. And it is. If you've ever found yourself dropping to the command line using only the GWT compiler because hosted mode was too slow, you really should check out 1.2. Refreshes in hosted mode are almost instantaneous, and hosted mode lets you actually debug your code, which is nice.

And of course, there were a few (dozen) bug fixes in 1.2 RC and a few more in the 1.2 release. Good riddance.

And if that weren't enough...the number of third-party development tools supporting GWT is growing quickly:

• JetBrains added fantastic GWT support in IDEA 6.0. Check out their video demo to see just how easy they make GWT development.
• Instantiations just launched GWT Designer for Eclipse, a very impressive visual GUI creator demonstrated recently in their webinar.
• Wirelexsoft VistaFei for GWT is a comprehensive WYSIWYG IDE for GWT, soon to be offered in a free Community Edition as well as an enhanced Enterprise Edition.

Joel Webber and I are also currently writing a book about GWT to be published by Addison-Wesley. Our plan is to explain all the nuts and bolts of GWT in excruciating detail.

It's way past bedtime, but one parting thought before I crash on a beanbag underneath this conference table: the GWT team rocks. You wouldn't believe how hard everyone has been working. And yet our urge to code is only growing as we see just how much people are starting to grok GWT.

Let us know what you think of the release in the GWT developer forum.

Many thanks to everyone who has tried out the GWT 1.2 Release Candidate so far. We hope you like the new OS X support and the optimized hosted mode reload time, and hopefully you've benefited from all the other fixes and enhancements as well. I wanted to summarize a few bug reports we've received related to new functionality in 1.2 RC (build 1.2.11) and give a quick update.Read More

Many thanks to everyone who has tried out the GWT 1.2 Release Candidate so far. We hope you like the new OS X support and the optimized hosted mode reload time, and hopefully you've benefited from all the other fixes and enhancements as well. I wanted to summarize a few bug reports we've received related to new functionality in 1.2 RC (build 1.2.11) and give a quick update.

• There was a bug related to whitespace in filenames that was discussed on the group. It was not a problem with IDEA at all...the goof was completely ours. It was written up as Issue 308 in the GWT Issue Tracker and a fix will be included in the 1.2 Final release.
• Some OS X users found that using certain add-on software (e.g. Creammonkey) conflicted with OS X hosted mode. Kelly explains it in Issue 296, which also includes a script that can automatically patch 1.2 RC to fix the problem.
• Certain uses of jar files to share modules were interacting badly with the new hosted mode caching infrastructure, as described in Issue 309. It has been fixed for the next build, but the issue writeup describes a workaround if you need one before then.
• We didn't state it explicitly before, but the new OS X hosted mode support only works on Tiger (OS X Version 10.4) or later.

If all goes as planned, we expect to wrap up changes related to the new 1.2 functionality and publish a final version of GWT 1.2 next week. We're resisting the temptation to slurp in additional changes since our goal is to finalize the things that were slated for 1.2. Once that's in your hands, we can quickly move on to another round of features and fixes as we push toward getting 1.3 out there (no ETA yet for that, but we'll keep you posted).