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.
"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."
