We're excited to have another guest blog post for you, brought to you by Jeet Kaul, VP of Sun's Developer Products and Programs. He's here to talk about using NetBeans to build web apps with GWT.
Google Web Toolkit is getting a lot of attention in the web developer community thanks to its interesting way of avoiding the need to write JavaScript code for interactive web applications. Developers from the NetBeans community recognized the benefits of such a solution and created a plug-in which integrates GWT support into the NetBeans IDE. NetBeans users can now choose GWT as one of the supported web frameworks, and NetBeans then helps them with all the important tasks such as editing, building, running and debugging GWT applications. Here's how to get started with GWT development in NetBeans and where to find more information about the plug-in.
Although GWT is not supported in NetBeans 6 out of the box, you can download this GWT plug-in and start developing GWT-based applications in NetBeans.
The first step is to install the plug-in using the Plug-in manager. Go to the "Tools | Plugins" menu action, switch to the "Downloaded" tab and locate the plug-in on your disk drive. You don't even have to restart your IDE - GWT support is instantly available for you!
The plug-in is seamlessly integrated into NetBeans IDE. That means that when you create a new web application GWT is shown as one of the available frameworks in the last step of the New project wizard. Here you can specify the GWT installation folder and choose the main entry point class of your GWT module.
You can use the plug-in both if you start from scratch or if you want to work on an existing GWT application. So if you used a different IDE than NetBeans before, it is easy to switch the GWT application to NetBeans. You just point the wizard to your existing GWT application and create a new project from existing sources.
Once you get the project created you can run the application simply by hitting the Run button. There are two options – you can either use the default Run action which deploys the application to the application server and opens your default web browser. The other option is to run GWT in hosted mode and then the GWT development shell is opened and you can see your application inside of it.
Debugging is also supported, so you can just run the Debug action and then the runtime is ran in debug mode. You can simply add breakpoints, step into, step out, etc. as you would expect in a regular web application.
NetBeans already provides lots of tooling out of the box that you can take advantage of, like a powerful XML editor, HTML editor and of course a Java editor with code completion and quick fixes. NetBeans 6 made huge strides in improving the editing experience and it shows when developing GWT applications, too. All GWT APIs are available for you including javadoc documentation, because the GWT jars get automatically added into the project during it's creation.
To learn more about GWT support in NetBeans, the project homepage and screencast can help you get started. Sang Shin, a member of the Sun technology evangelism team, also created a free course for GWT and NetBeans, so you can learn from his examples and do the hands-on lab.
The plug-in was developed as an open source project so we encourage developers to join the project and contribute. There are many ways you can contribute, even submitting an issue or request for enhancement counts.
The future roadmap contains exciting features such as refactoring for GWT and GWT-specific quick fixes in the editor which will make developing GWT code even more comfortable. We are always looking for feedback, so if you try out the project let the developers know what you think.
Another project that may be of interest is jMaki, an AJAX framework that provides a lightweight model for creating JavaScript centric AJAX-enabled web applications using Java, Ruby, PHP, and Phobos. jMaki has an integrated NetBeans module for all the above languages, and some new features are being developed that will expose all the jMaki widgets as GWT java components, easily accessible to GWT application developers using NetBeans.
There's also Project Woodstock, which provides the next generation of User Interface Components for the web, based on Java Server Faces and AJAX. This open source collaboration enables a community of developers to create powerful and intuitive web applications that are accessible and localizable, and which are based on a uniform set of guidelines and components, to help ensure ease of development and ease of use. These components enable visual web application development in NetBeans. Just drag and drop from the palette into the designer canvas and visually bind them to heterogeneous back end data sources (e.g. databases, Web Services, EJBs). Build powerful applications in minutes.
The NetBeans community has been growing a lot in past several years and NetBeans became a truly universal IDE, so if you haven't tried it recently, you may be surprised about the progress it has made. After all, it won't cost you much - it's free and open source. So give it a try today!
Pearson's Voices That Matter: Google Web Toolkit conference is only a few weeks away, and we're eager to meet folks from the GWT community there. For those of you looking for a little financial assistance, we've worked with Pearson to put together a GWT Scholarship. It's meant to reward folks who have built neat things with GWT, made it better by submitting bug reports and patches, or simply actively discussed GWT in the forums. If you receive a scholarship, you can attend the 3-day conference for a reduced rate of just $150.
We'll be handing out 25 scholarships to folks who have worked hard and contributed to the GWT community. Examples of contributions are:
If you're interested in applying for the Pearson GWT Conference Scholarship, send us an email explaining how you've contributed and how the scholarship would benefit you (no more than 300 words, please!) at gwt-pearson@google.com no later than Friday, November 16, 2007. We'll announce the recipients on Wednesday, November 21, 2007.
And we're looking forward to seeing you at the conference!
Update: scholarships still available
As an update: there are still scholarships available to attend the Voices That Matter: Google Web Toolkit conference in a few weeks in San Francisco. While we've seen several compelling entries, we'd love to see what else is lurking in the GWT community. We'll update this thread when we've run out; in the meantime, please drop us a line if you're interested.
We've got another guest blog post, this time from Russell Ivanovic, Software Developer at Groundhog Software. He's here to talk about his experience building a new product using GWT.
In 2006 Groundhog Software partnered with education specialists to deliver an electronic portfolio solution. As fate would have it, GWT was released by Google during the R&D phase of this project. Groundhog recognised that, even in its infancy (version 1.0), this was a product that could deliver the usability, scalability and ease of development that we needed. A proof of concept prototype was built successfully, and after funding was secured, full scale production began.
Today, Groundhog Software's solution ePo Builder is successfully deployed in a pilot of over 80 schools, catering for over 16,000+ users.
So what benefits did GWT bring to the table? Let's look at a few:
Our website has more information about ePo Builder and Groundhog Software.
We wanted to highlight another success story for GWT. Lombardi Software has created an innovative modeling tool called Blueprint that they recently built using GWT. Rather than having me tell the story, here are the details from Alex Moffat, Engineering Manger at Lombardi:
Lombardi Blueprint includes around 28,500 lines of our Java code that gets compiled to JavaScript by GWT. We think that's quite a lot but the largest page is 50% smaller, at 480K, than the less functional Dojo based prototype, and it was much easier to develop.
The challenge handed to us was to create a tool that the average business user could use to document and manage their business processes. It had to be easy to use, encourage collaboration between team members, and provide a shared repository for all of a company's process documentation. Workflow functionality had to be on par with our competitors: Microsoft Visio, IDS Scheer's ARIS, IBM's WebSphere Business Modeler, and other desktop modeling tools. But we also wanted wiki & shared whiteboard capabilities to store information. Editing should use the drag and drop interaction users of desktop apps are familiar with. We ended up with some additional features that really set us apart:
All that was a significant task for us to tackle and without GWT we wouldn't have accomplished it. It turned out that coding in JavaScript just wasn't an option for such a complex application. If you're developing a browser based app we'd highly recommend using GWT. And we've seen great success, with thousands of users in Fortune 500 companies around the world. And opposite the Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 concern, users actually pay for our app!
(see the larger video)
Back when we began developing Blueprint, we started with a combination of HTML and Flash 8 for the interactive parts. We ended up abandoning that fairly quickly for a couple of reasons:
Our next iteration was pure HTML and JavaScript using Dojo. This approach fixed the problems we had with Flash, but had its own issues:
Around that time, GWT 1.3 was released and we decided to take the plunge. Fortunately we didn't have to convert all of our JavaScript code to GWT at once. By using GWT's JSNI facilities, we were able to migrate areas gradually as we needed to make functional changes. Compared to our earlier efforts, GWT has allowed us to be far more productive and flexible. The big wins for us have been:
Line count comparisons between the Dojo and GWT based versions of Blueprint are invidious, not least because the GWT version of Blueprint includes much more functionality than the Dojo based one did. However, for our last Dojo based release we wrote around 8,500 lines of JavaScript, and at this point we've written 28,500 lines of Java code, excluding comments, which GWT compiles to JavaScript. There's no way we could have built the equivalent functionality using JavaScript, and as mentioned before the resulting downloads are still smaller.
Overall we believe GWT has enabled us to write a much more reliable and efficient application and build it faster than we could have otherwise. Since its release just 120 days ago, people in 60 countries have begun using Blueprint; this represents more than 750 companies and thousands of individuals. You can check it out for yourself and let us know what you think!
Over the summer we blogged about a conference dedicated to the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) that the folks at Pearson Education are planning. We're happy to announce that the agenda has been posted.
Voices That Matter: Google Web Toolkit will take place December 3-6, 2007 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The week kicks off on Monday, December 3rd, with (optional) preliminary workshops on JavaScript and AJAX development to prepare attendees for the rest of the week. Starting Tuesday morning, core conference sessions include:
In addition to the talks and panels, there will be several opportunities for more casual interactions with members of the GWT community, including the conference speakers. Nearly all of the GWT team will be speaking and participating in the conference including co-creators of GWT Bruce Johnson and Joel Webber. Feel free to check out the complete list of speakers.
Be sure to register before October 27th to receive the "early bird" discount. We'll see you there!
In our not-so-humble opinions, we think that the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and the Apple iPhone are two very cool technologies. Because we're all highfalutin computer-scientist types (as well as being irrepressibly geeky) we wanted to see what happens when you mix them together. Would it be like peanut-butter and chocolate, or hot-sauce and poison ivy? Our approach was to build an application that primarily targets the iPhone and to use that as a test-bed for new ideas.
So what kind of application should we build? The application should:
And so the GWT Feed Reader was created. It combines the Google AJAX Feed API with a user interface geared for use on the iPhone. The source code to GWT Feed Reader is available under an Open Source license from a Google Code project.
The primary take-away from this project is to say this: The Google Web Toolkit can be used to create applications that, in the same code base, work well on an iPhone and a traditional desktop browser. You can read more about the development of the GWT Feed Reader in a Google Groups article.
It's a really big day for Google Web Toolkit: GWT 1.4 is now available -- and, with more than a million downloads under our belt, GWT is no longer in beta!
Let's start with what some folks have to say about their experience using GWT during the past year...
The toolkit is more than a pleasure to use and made my web-app development actually FUN again. - Dean S. Jones
This year, for the first time, I have started to learn AJAX. To get my feet in the ground, I have attended several seminars and talked to many friends knowledgeable on AJAX. I came across a lot of frameworks and tools. Dojo, Prototype, Rico, Scriptaculous, jMaki - you name it. I had everything installed in my laptop. After struggling for a month, I realized that I was not learning anything new, let alone building an application using AJAX. Then, I looked at GWT. Things slowly started moving in the positive direction. I was able to leverage my 8-10 years of Java experience to build AJAX applications using GWT. I didn't have to bother learning javascript or other AJAX internals. GWT made sure that the application I am writing is cross-browser compatible. Thanks to the Google team for building this wonderful piece of technology. You must realize how many new people are benefited everyday from your hard work and creativity. I have completed my second AJAX project using GWT. I couldn't have done this without you. - Sudhansu Pati
Q: Can anyone provide a ball-park numeric estimate of how much time the use of GWT saved you? - John Gunther [asked on the GWT Developer Forum] A: 100% + faster. Easily. And this number goes up as application complexity goes up. - Ryan Dewsbury A: GWT will -really- save you time in maintenance (try and refactor browser dependent javascript if you dare!), and GWT is a great tool for scaling your server, because it allows you to ship off a lot of state info to the client. - Reinier Zwitserloot
For a while we had an AJAX-style solution using JavaScript hand-coded by a contractor. The contractor left, the code was the most hideous thing I've ever seen...that sure wasn't the answer. [...] The original application was developed over a period of several years, [yet] we have basically rewritten the user interface in GWT with three Java developers over about five months. There is no way we could have done that writing in any kind of scripting language, and still have it be maintainable and flexible (which is very important to me). - Tim Ihde
Keep up the good work...this project is the best I've seen in a long time! It's already saved me weeks of tedious javascript coding and revolutionised the way my company writes technology demos. - Sam Halliday
If you're interested to learn more, here are some links to help you get started:
There's lots and lots of cool new stuff in GWT 1.4, so it's hard to know where to start. How about application performance?! This release includes several breakthroughs that make your compiled GWT code significantly smaller and faster. Many users are reporting that after a simple recompile with 1.4, their applications are up to 30% smaller and 20%-50% faster. And startup time in particular is now highly optimized thanks to a new bootstrapping technique and the availability of image bundles. To see the new hotness in action, try visiting the new-and-improved Mail sample a few times. It's darn fast the very first time you visit it, but subsequent visits are insanely fast. That's because, in addition to a fast initial startup, GWT code uses a clever caching technique to prevent applications from making unnecessary HTTP requests. As Joel Webber (Tech Lead of GWT Core Libraries) would say, "The fastest HTTP requests are those that do not, in fact, occur."
Here's a broad overview of the major enhancements:
Additional details on these new features and bugfixes are in the blog post announcing the original GWT 1.4 Release Candidate.
For all you GWT veterans ready to download GWT 1.4, see the new FAQ section "How do I upgrade to GWT 1.4?" for step-by-step instructions on the update.
And for anyone totally new to GWT, on behalf of the awesomely cool developer community and the GWT engineering team at Google, welcome!
At long last, Google Web Toolkit (GWT) 1.4 Release Candidate 2 is now available for download. Though it has taken some time since 1.4 RC1 was released, we've fixed nearly 100 bugs since then. This may well be the best and most solid GWT release to date, and we expect this build will become the final 1.4 release. Still, until we designate a "final" 1.4 release, we strongly recommend against using it in production applications. If you run into problems, please let us know in the issue tracker. And if you don't run into any problems, please take a moment to thank all of the GWT open source contributors who have made such a big impact on GWT 1.4. :)
Looking ahead, we plan to start on GWT 1.5 quickly, the main thrust of which will be Java 5.0 language support and all that entails. We intend to make a wholesale shift to 5.0 syntax for all GWT client code; with luck this won't be problematic, since Java 5.0 syntax is largely backwards compatible. An open question is whether we will continue to produce Java 1.4-compatible server-side components. Feel free to join in the discussions on the Developer Forum.
With all of the excitement around Google Developer Day, we didn't have a chance to tell you about a subtle point regarding the launch of the Google Mashup Editor: the editor's front-end was built using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). Given that, we invited Rich Burdon, Tech Lead of the Google Mashup Editor team, to write a post detailing why they chose to develop using GWT. Here's Rich:
At Google Developer Day, we launched the Google Mashup Editor -- a quick way to build simple applications. The Mashup Editor lets you create mashups without having to do much coding; instead, you use standard HTML and extended tags, which correspond to UI controls that can display and manipulate RSS, Atom and GData feeds.
The product consists of three parts:
Before starting the project, our team already had a lot of experience building complex AJAX applications by hand -- and had experienced many of the problems associated with this approach. Here are some of the reasons why we chose to use GWT rather than rolling our own native JavaScript framework this time around:
Of course, the other huge benefit of open systems (and especially open source projects) is learning from the collective wisdom of everyone who uses the technology. And so we're looking forward to incorporating the ongoing developments of GWT within the Mashup Editor.
Interested in playing around with the Google Mashup Editor? Head over to its homepage to sign up for the limited beta, and then check out our mashup gallery and developer forum for sample mashups built by the community.
OSCON 2007 is starting now! As you may have already read, Google is quite involved with OSCON this year. On the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) team, we're especially excited as this is the first OSCON since GWT went open source.
Joel Webber, Bob Vawter, Rajeev Dayal, and I are heading to Portland to be on hand for Wednesday evening's Google Web Toolkit Hack Session. We hope it'll be a lively discussion about what people are already doing with GWT, what important questions are lingering, and suggestions for future improvements. Attendance is limited at this event, so please arrive promptly.
And beyond the numerous other talks Googlers are giving, Joel Webber will speak on Thursday about Writing Big Apps with GWT.
Also on Thursday, at the AJAX Experience in San Francisco, Dan Morrill will be presenting Fast, Easy, Beautiful: Pick Three -- Building AJAX Apps with GWT.
Outside of conference participation, we wanted to let you know that we're in the home stretch for the second release candidate for GWT 1.4. If you've not already had a chance to see GWT 1.4's first RC, we'd recommend you read up on what's new, and try it out. For GWT 1.4 RC2, you can watch the progress on GWT's issue tracker as open issues dwindle.
A little while ago, we heard from the folks over at Pearson Education who said they were impressed with the interest in the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and wanted to produce a 3-day GWT conference. After a few conversations to flesh out topics and program logistics, we’re pleased to report that Voices That Matter: Google Web Toolkit is set for December 4-6, 2007 in San Francisco. We couldn’t be happier to be working with Pearson on this event.
While we’re still discussing the nitty-gritty details of the schedule, nearly all of the GWT team will be speaking and participating in the conference, so we hope we’ll be able to have a chance to talk with you. You can be certain that the topics will include:
If there are specific topics you want to learn more about, please speak up on the GWT Developer Forum. And in case you just can’t wait until December, you’re in luck:
Now that we've almost recovered from Google Developer Day, it's time for a quick review of some recent GWT sightings in the blogosphere:
The Google Web Toolkit talk that Bruce Johnson and I gave at Google Developer Day is now online. As you might have guessed, it emphasizes end-user experience, GWT usability features, and several of the big improvements made in GWT 1.4 RC.
This is an in-progress blog series talking about the nuts and bolts of GWT by Ray Cromwell, CTO of Timepedia. Timepedia recently released Chronoscope, a GWT charting and visualization platform. In his first post, Ray delves into some of the theory and practice of the GWT compiler, explaining many invisible-but-important details that don't typically get a lot of fanfare.
AgileAjax recently posted an interview with Dr. Adam Tacy and Robert Hanson, authors of GWT in Action. With the benefit of a full year's experience, they thoroughly answer some of the initial doubts about the GWT approach expressed on Ajaxian soon after GWT's initial launch.
It is quite rewarding to see increasing awareness of just how well the GWT approach works in practice and how much value the GWT compiler and code generators bring to the AJAX development process.
To add to the excitement around Google Developer Day, just a hair after our one-year launch anniversary, it turns out that Google Web Toolkit (GWT) has been downloaded more than 1 million times!
We're especially excited to see the amount of interest since GWT went open source. With advances like those in GWT 1.4, we feel we're making solid progress towards our mission "to radically improve the web experience for users by enabling developers to use existing Java tools to build no-compromise AJAX for any modern browser" (you can read more about our mission to make GWT better).
So try out GWT. You'll be in good company.
We hope you saw the recent announcement of Google Gears, which is being unveiled at Google Developer Day.
Well, we were so excited about the possibility of AJAX applications working even while offline, we went ahead and put together the Google API Library for Google Web Toolkit with support for Google Gears. This open source library allows developers writing applications with Google Web Toolkit to take advantage of the Google Gears APIs to develop applications that work offline — on a plane or anywhere else you happen to be.
Since interoperability is at the very core of GWT, we wanted to take this opportunity to show an example of how GWT applications can be built with JavaScript APIs, taking advantage of GWT's JavaScript Native Interface (JSNI).
Please keep in mind that this is an early prototype of this library, and so your mileage may vary. We are planning to add support for other Google APIs; if you'd like to help, please check out Making GWT Better, and contribute your ideas. If you're curious to get started, check out the project on Google Code.
I'm very happy to report that Google Web Toolkit (GWT) 1.4 Release Candidate is now available for download.
This is undoubtedly the biggest GWT release yet. In addition to 150+ bugfixes, GWT 1.4 RC includes a ton of new features, improvements and optimizations. You'll find the complete itemized list of changes in the GWT issue tracker, but here's the short(er) version:
GWT 1.4 RC is the first release developed with major participation from the GWT open source contributors. Many of the biggest improvements in GWT 1.4 RC came from ideas and patches contributed by the community. A big congratulations and thank you is in order to everyone who has worked so hard to make GWT 1.4 RC happen.
In other GWT news...
It seems like it's been one major event after another lately. Next up: Google Developer Day! It's happening Thursday! Please join us in Mountain View if you can, or if you'd rather, go to GWT sessions in Beijing, London, Paris, Sao Paulo, or Sydney.
With that, I'll leave you to go play with GWT 1.4 RC. As always, let us know what you think in the GWT Developer Forum.
Since JavaOne is where we first introduced you to the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), we're quite excited about all that we're doing at JavaOne this year. If you're attending the conference, be sure to check out Bruce and Joel's GWT session (Wednesday, May 9 @ 1:30pm). We hope you'll also be able to stop by the Google booth to chat. Feel free to let us know on the GWT Developer Forum, so we know to look for you.
For those of you near Seattle, Washington, if you've been waiting for a GWT presentation to get your feet wet, I'm happy to report that Bob Vawter is presenting at SeaJUG next week (Tuesday, May 15 @ 7pm).
We've also recently discovered a very elegant application built with GWT: eTripBuilder.com. Not only is their application small (136K, uncompressed) and speedy, but they're taking advantage of some of GWT's benefits: they are using history, they've built custom widgets (e.g. a date picker), and they've made great use of CSS. We're proud that GWT is a part of such a great app.
I know we've been a little quiet lately about Google Web Toolkit (GWT) product development, but, don't worry, we're feverishly polishing up the codebase for GWT 1.4. We've checked in all the source code for the new features, and we'll produce a release candidate once we address all the Critical and High priority issues tagged as 1.4RC.
On the app development side of things, we're really excited to see a new application called QueWeb Customer Care, which is a Customer Relationship Management tool built with GWT; go ahead and play with a demo (you have to register, but it's free). They've done some fancy stuff and the app is still quite fast.
In other news, we'd like to give a warm welcome to Rajeev Dayal and Bob Vawter, two relatively new software engineers on the GWT team. Given logistics, Rajeev, Bob and Joel Webber weren't pictured previously, but we didn't want to leave them out of the fun:
Of course, if you just can't wait to get started, you can always download GWT 1.3. Or if you'd like to throw in a few bug fixes of your own, you can get started on Making GWT Better.
This year, the Google Web Toolkit is participating in the Google Summer of Code. We were absolutely amazed by the turnout. We received over 100 proposals in response to our request for ideas! We wish we could have accepted everyone, but we had to pick three.
Here are the students who will be working with the GWT team this summer, and their projects:
The competition was fierce -- we had a really tough time narrowing down the field to those three. Thanks to everyone who applied!
We hope you'll help us welcome Aleksey, Aleksandar, and Tomasz as they get started on their projects. They'll be basing their work on the current version of GWT, and we look forward to adding these exciting features to a future version.
Recently I've been working on some Google Web Toolkit (GWT) libraries that involve JSON and JSONP. While working on this project, I've been reminded just how tricky AJAX can be. It's no secret that there are a lot of people out there who spend huge portions of their lives thinking up ways to steal your data (or worse). Unfortunately, the same cool tricks that let you build AJAX sites and mashups also make it easy to build unsafe web applications. Some of the attacks evildoers have come up with are downright devious!
One of the key goals of GWT is to let developers focus on their users' needs, instead of on JavaScript and browser quirks. However, the consequences of a security exploit can be serious, so it's important that GWT developers understand how such attacks work, and how to prevent them.
To help get the word out, I've put together an article on my experiences. Eventually we'll merge its contents into the GWT Developer Documentation, but we thought that it was important to get this out to GWT developers rather than wait for the next documentation update.
You can find the article here: Security for GWT Applications. I hope you find it useful; if you do (or even if you don't), please feel free to let me know in the GWT Developer Forum!
Last week, I had the pleasure of visiting the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) engineering team in our Atlanta Engineering office and participating in our Atlanta open house (read about how it went). This was a fun event mostly designed to let the Atlanta community hear about what our engineers are working on in Midtown Atlanta. That is, what we're working on outside of hiring more people.
I'm eager to share some photos, which include an appearance by President Jimmy Carter, but before we get to that, let me update you all on the happenings in and around GWT:
Now I'll leave you with a few photos:
The Google Web Toolkit team (from left to right):
During the office tour, Scott demonstrated a new kind of "diplomacy" to President Carter with one of the GWT team's lightsabers... er... conflict-resolution facilitators.
As we had hoped, GWT 1.3 RC 2 has proved stable and is ready to graduate today, making build 1.3.3 the official GWT 1.3 distribution. If you've been waiting to upgrade to 1.3, it's ready when you are.
In case you missed the news, GWT 1.3 is the first fully open source version of GWT. Our open source charter, "Making GWT Better," explained that GWT development would take place in the open, and that we'd even publish our engineering meeting notes. We're happy to report that it's working out really well. We've had many fruitful discussions on the contributors forum, and we've already received and accepted some patches that will make it into the next version of GWT.
There have also been a few noteworthy developments in the larger GWT community:
What's next for GWT? We've published our development goals for GWT 1.4 on the GWT project wiki. Please take a look and let us know what you think on the GWT user forum.
We're thrilled with the response to the 100% open source launch last month: lots of people downloaded GWT, the activity picked up on the Developer Forum, and we've received some great advice on the Contributor Forum (which helps make GWT better).
Now that the holidays are behind us, we've packed up the second release candidate for version 1.3. We expect that this binary will actually turn into the final 1.3 release, but we want to give it some time in the wild before we label it as such. If you're curious to know what's being addressed in 1.3, please look at [milestone:1_3_Final].
As to what's next, for 1.4, we plan to focus on improving performance and cleaning up bugs (especially the critical ones), though we might throw in a few new widgets. This will lay a rock-solid foundation for a feature-packed 1.5.
So, now is the time to act: if you've spotted any issues or have any feature requests, please make sure to enter them into the GWT issue tracker.
