A couple of months ago, we put the spotlight on the GWT community to highlight some of the great things that have been going on. Since then, there has been a lot of new activity to talk about, so we'd like to share these announcements with you below:
GWT Server Library (GWT-SL) 0.1.5b Released: The GWT-SL library provides developers with a way to easily use GWT with the Spring framework. In this latest release, the library provides support for integration with Gilead (formerly known as hibernate4gwt) and has been updated to work with GWT 1.5.3, and also includes many other new features and improvements.
Gilead 1.2.1 Released: Gilead lets you export persistent entites from the JVM to the outside world. For GWT, it means easy integration with Hibernate. This maintenance releases includes support for Maven support and comet4gwt among other new enhancements. If you use Hibernate, or any other of the new technologies Gilead now supports, check out the library on their project page.
Dependency Injection in GWT: You may already be familiar with GIN (GWT INjection), a dependency injection library that integrates GWT with the Guice framework. However, in case you wanted to try a new flavor of guice (pun intended), you may want to take a look at the recently introduced suco library, which offers its own guice-style dependency injection technique.
emite 0.4.6 Released: emite is an open-source library that implements an XMPP communication protocol and provides hooks for GWT integration. This means you can now make your GWT applications more chatty using this library. If you want to have your users chatting over and about your GWT application, this library might be worth checking out.
More fun stuff
Google I/O: Google's developer conference is coming back again this year at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California. If you attended last year, you'll know that lots of great talks and impromptu chats with Google engineers await. Like last year, the conference will feature a handful of awesome GWT related talks, not to mention members of the GWT team onsite to answer all your questions. Check out the registration page if you'd like to meet some of us in person.
Community meetups are a great way to meet new people with similar passions and interests as your own. It's also a great place for the community to exchange ideas. Often you get an interesting presentation to boot.
In fact, for those of you interested and within reasonable traveling distance, the Silicon Valley Web Builders and the Silicon Valley JavaScript Meetup Group have organized an exciting AJAX Panel next week on February 18th 2009. There will be representatives there from YUI, Dojo, MooTools, JQuery and of course GWT. There's a lot of interest, so be sure to sign up before the event fills up.
I've also been talking with the SV-GTUG (Silicon Valley - Google Technology User Group) organizers about doing a GWT presentation at an upcoming meeting. We don't have a firm date yet, but I'd like to start collecting your questions and suggestions for material you'd like to see covered. You can vote on other people's ideas or post your own questions here.
Finally, if you know about or organize a local user group that has developers interested in GWT, let me know. I'd like to hear about your group, and perhaps there's a way we can help make your meetings even more compelling.
By Eric Ayers, Google Web Toolkit Team
Another round of updates is ready for the Google API Libraries for Google Web Toolkit (GWT). This update brings bug fixes and new features to three of the existing libraries. The Google Visualization API Library for GWT moves from a release candidate to a public release with a few bug fixes. The Gadgets API Library for GWT now supports GadgetAds , gadget based internationalization and an important bug fix for Windows developers using GWT hosted mode. The Google Maps API Library for GWT now includes support for the GAdsManager and reverse geocoding support. We are also announcing a major update to the Gears API Library for GWT to support the Gears 0.4 feature set, which includes Geolocation, HTTP Request, Desktop and Blob support.
This release is exciting to me not just for the new features that have been added, but also for the number of new contributors to the libraries from the open source community. Special thanks to Mark Renouf for contributing Gears 0.4 support, and all those that filed issues and contributed patches.
You can find the new libraries ready for download on Google Code.
