GWT Blog

Gadgets, Gears, and AJAX Search Google API Libraries for GWT Now Available

Friday, October 31, 2008

By Eric Ayers, Google Web Toolkit Team

We're pleased to announce the final release of the Gears 1.1, Gadgets 1.0, and Search 1.1 APIs, all part of the Google API Libraries for Google Web Toolkit project. We are also making available a second release candidate for the Maps API.

Download Now

Online Documentation

Each library comes with:

Apache 2.0 Open Source license
Online Developer Guide
Online Tutorial
Online and Offline Javadoc documentation
Sample Code
Community discussion and Support through the Google-Web-Toolkit Google Group
Issue Tracking through Google Code at http://code.google.com/p/gwt-google-apis

Changes since last Release Candidate:

Gears 1.1 (1.1.1)

Bugfixes
Sample Code updated
Messages can now be of types other than String
WorkerPool demo added

Gagets 1.0 (1.0.1)

Bugfixes
RPC sample added
HelloGadgets sample overhauled
@InjectContent annotation added to add additional HTML to the module spec

Search 1.0 (1.0.1)

Bugfixes
LocalSearch integrates better with the Maps API

Maps 1.0 RC2 (1.0.1)

Bugfixes
Updates to allow extention and subclassing of various Maps components
Maps API samples set the Maps version to v=2 for better stability

ARIA For GWT: My health Is feeling accessible

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

By T.V. Raman, Research Scientist

As described in our earlier article outlining ARIA support in GWT1.5, widgets now include basic support for W3C ARIA, an emerging set of Web standards that enable AJAX applications to work smoothly with screenreaders. But there is more to using an application than interacting with individual user interface widgets — overall usability is determined by the complete user experience.

We have improved the usability of Google Health for screenreader users by enhancing the built-in support available in GWT 1.5 via JavaScript. The resulting user experience enables users of screenreaders and self-voicing browsers to easily navigate the interface to obtain relevant auditory feedback — see the following sections for additional details.

First Time User Tips:

Note that the accessibility support in Google Health requires support from both the browser as well as the adaptive technology in use. At present, we recommend Firefox 3.0 with screenreaders that support ARIA, alternatively, you can also use Fire Vox, the self-voicing extension to Firefox 3.0.

When signing in, first-time users should use this link ARIA-Enabled Google Health to turn on the accessibility enhancements. If you would like to use these enhancements whenever you sign in to Google Health, please perform these additional steps:

Activate settings by pressing hot key e, or alternatively, press . to bring up the available actions and pick settings from the list of choices.
Listen to the spoken messages that guide you through the settings interface.
Check the option labeled enable screenreader support.
Save your preferences.
This will automatically activate ARIA support the next time you sign in as long as you use a supported browser.

Google Health: A High-Level Overview You can have one or more health profiles on Google Health, and once logged in, you can create and access health profiles from the main screen. Use the navigation keys (arrow keys) to navigate the interface. The left and right arrow keys move you through the major categories, whereas the up and down arrow keys move through the items in a given category. adaptive technology in use produces appropriate feedback as you move. In addition, the item under focus is visually highlighted and can be magnified by pressing the = key. Auditory feedback includes spoken output from the adaptive technology, augmented by short auditory icons that help orient the user within the application. The bulk of the Google Health application consists of navigating among various categories, finding the relevant item within a category, and if needed, updating the contents of that item. As an example, when working with your health profile, you can:

Navigate to the category that holds biometric information, e.g., your height and weight.

Navigate through the various items of data in this category with the up and down arrow keys.

As you navigate, the current value of each item is spoken.

Pressing enter allows you to modify the value of the current item.

You can pull up a list of available actions at any time by pressing .. Use the up and down arrows to move through this list, and press enter to activate the current action. Notice that this list can be filtered by typing a partial command name in the edit field — this provides a power key feature.

This paradigm of navigating with the arrow keys, and pressing enter to edit the current item and using power keys for picking the desired action is applied consistently across all aspects of Google Health. Many categories in this application have a large number of items, e.g., the list of medications. In addition to the up and down arrow keys, these lists can be navigated by pressing capital letters to directly jump to the relevant section in the list of items. In addition, the application provides wizards for performing complex tasks, e.g., finding a doctor. To conclude, here is a short summary of the generic key-bindings that are available throughout the application:

Key

Function

ESC

Return to the main Health Profile screen

Display available actions with completion.

Speak keyboard help

Magnify item under focus

Shrink item under focus

LEFT

Move to previous category

RIGHT

Move to next category

Move to previous item in category

DOWN

Move to next item in category

Release Candidate Available: Google Maps API Library for GWT

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Following up on our earlier post, a release candidate of the Google Maps API Library for GWT is now available for download. This library provides a way to access the Google Maps API from a GWT project without having to write additional JavaScript code. The library gives you full control using the standard Maps components such as InfoWindows, Markers, MapTypes, and Geocoding. You can even use advanced features such as adding GWT widgets to the Map, creating custom overlays, custom map types, and other components.In addition to maps, the Google API Libraries for GWT also provide libraries for Gears, Gadgets and the Google AJAX Search API. Please try out these release candidates and give us feedback, either through the issue tracker on code.google.com, or through the Google-Web-Toolkit or Google-Web-Toolkit-Contributors group.

New GWT Incubator Drop available

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

By Emily Crutcher, Google Web Toolkit TeamA special thanks to the great group of engineers outside of Google who have contributed to the project including Ray Cromwell, Jason Essington, Daniel Florey, Fred Sauer. Widgets

DatePicker, a fully internationalized and extensible date picking widget

GlassPanel, produces a translucent effect around UI components, useful to indicate currently non-interactive components

FastTree, a fully customizable tree with a rich event mode

SliderBar/ProgressBar/Spinner, a set of really useful widgets to add pizazz to your project

Tablestable suite

Bulk rendering of tables(up to 10x faster than normal rendering)

Scrolling tables, where the footer and header are fixed

Paging tables, where the table can page through arbitrary data sets

Editable tables, complete with common cell editors

LoggingGWT logging suite

Logging levels based on the Java logging system

Categories and filters to narrow logging output

A native Java mode for shared code, where the output can be integrated with your server logging system

Compilation options so logging can be completely removed or minimally included for production mode

A variety of logging handlers that output to everything from Firebug to a GWT tree widget

CSS supportCssResourcecsscsscss

Strips CSS of comments and white space

Aggregates CSS into a single html file

(And in an advanced configuration)

Obfucates css style names
Eliminates unused css rules
Selectively applies rules per browser

GraphicsGWTCanvas Widget

Rotations, scales, and translation

Custom paths including arcs, lines and curve

Image drawing and transformations

Compositing operations and transparency

Built-in Accessibility in GWT 1.5 Applications

Friday, September 05, 2008

By Alex Rudnick, Google Web Toolkit TeamAs websites and applications become more interactive, users relying on assistive technology can find navigation difficult. Dynamic web applications are often written in ways that screen readers -- which interpret visual interfaces by speaking out loud or producing braille -- have difficulty interpreting. A developer building a tree widget, for example, might use a list element that has been altered to behave like a tree control. By default, a screen reader would present the control as a list, making the tree unusable for blind or visually impaired users. Screen readers also generally treat HTML span or div elements as regular static text elements, regardless of the presence of JavaScript event handlers for user interaction. You can easily imagine how this causes problems.However, there's hope on the horizon in the form of WAI-ARIA, a specification for making web applications accessible via a standard set of DOM attributes. Currently a work-in-progress at the W3C, WAI-ARIA describes how to encode the purpose and function of a widget so browsers and screen readers can work together to properly identify widgets made up of DOM elements. To make applications built with GWT more easily accessible, we've added accessibility support to the GWT library by baking ARIA roles and states into our widgets. With the accompanying ARIA support in Firefox and Opera (and soon, WebKit and Internet Explorer), applications built with the latest release of GWT will provide the information needed by screen readers such as JAWS, Window-Eyes, and FireVox. The ARIA support in the end-user tools is a bit of a moving target, but we've documented what works and what doesn't at present, so your application can evolve with the web.If you've built your own widgets, you can make them accessible with the new Accessibility class, and to test out your newly-accessible widgets, you can watch for the ARIA attributes with a DOM inspector like Firebug. To check for the appropriate accessibility events, you can use a tool like Microsoft's Accessible Event Watcher -- or just install FireVox and listen to your application read aloud.For more on ARIA and how to make sure your GWT application is easily accessible, you can read up on Accessibility in the GWT Developer's Guide.

GWT 1.5 Now Available

Thursday, August 28, 2008

li { margin-top: 0.5em } We're happy — no, ecstatic — to announce that GWT 1.5 is now officially released and available for download. Download GWT 1.5 GWT 1.5 delivers what we think are an impressive number of improvements, about four hundred issues if you're counting. We're also happy that one of those is issue 168, our most-requested feature, Support for Java 5. We've blogged about several of the new features already. Now that it's official, let's recap and expand the list a bit... Java 5 language support and enhanced JRE emulation

You can now use Java generics to add clarity and type safety to your client-side Java source. Generics also greatly simplify the definition of GWT RPC services — no more @gwt.typeArgs.

Simplify your code with for-each loops, autoboxing, static imports, and enum types.

Subsystems such as RPC, image bundles, internationalization, and benchmarking now use proper annotations. To maximize code re-use, the GWT compiler also ignores unrecognized annotations, such as those required by JPA, that typically appear on types shared between the client and server.

New JRE emulation classes have been added including StringBuilder, TreeMap, LinkedHashMap, and other popular utility classes.

Assertions are now optionally supported in web mode. If you invoke the GWT compiler using the -ea flag, assert statements in your code will be retained in the compiled JavaScript. This can be helpful during QA cycles.

Performance optimizations and easier JavaScript interop

The GWT compiler has gotten smarter. It now does comprehensive method inlining, which can eliminate signficant overhead due to function calls. Developers using GWT 1.5 release candidate builds have reported speedups of up to 2x, especially in performance-sensitive areas of their code. We've even heard from end users that apps compiled with GWT 1.5 just feel faster. Admittedly, feels faster isn't a quantifiable benchmark, but we sure like the sound of it.

The venerable Tree widget has gotten much faster in GWT 1.5. In tests, we've measured huge improvements across the board, including 5x and 10x speedups on IE7 and IE6, respectively.

With new JavaScript overlay types, you can seamlessly and efficiently integrate with objects originating in handwritten JavaScript. Overlay types also provide a particularly elegant new way to interact with JSON data from GWT.

The new Linker subsystem gives you total control over your code's packaging and bootstrap behavior so that you can deploy GWT output into any context where JavaScript is relevant (think Gadgets, Firefox extensions, Greasemonkey scripts and Gears worker threads). If it sounds complicated, don't worry: most GWT users can simply re-use the built-in linkers. But it's nice to know you can create your own if you need to. See Bob Vawter's Google I/O talk on Linkers for the theory, and Ray Cromwell's GWT Extreme! talk for some enlightening real-world examples.

Prettier widgets, better DOM, accessibility, and bi-di

The original KitchenSink sample has been retired in favor of a new sample called Showcase. In addition to demonstrating a wide variety of GWT features — widgets, themes, animation, history, accessibility, internationalization and bi-di to name a few — Showcase helps developers understand how code and CSS fit together by providing the source for each showcased feature.

Experienced GWT developers know and like the fact that widgets rely almost exclusively on CSS for styling. However, prior to GWT 1.5, GWT projects did not include a stylesheet by default, giving developers new to GWT the unfortunate impression that GWT widgets were inherently ugly. With this release, we're introducing three nice-looking default CSS themes you can use as a starting point for your own designs.

Not only are the standard GWT widgets prettier in this release, they're more functional. The major widgets such as Tree, MenuBar, and TabPanel now support ARIA for enhanced accessibility. In addition, widgets now support bi-directionality so that UI works properly for right-to-left languages. (You can see all this in action in the Showcase sample.)

A new cross-browser DOM package maps the entire set of W3C bindings onto GWT-compatible Java classes. After all, not every project needs full-on widgets. If you want to do low-level DOM programming or you're writing new widgets, you'll really like these new classes. It feels as if you're writing JavaScript DOM manipulation code but better: you get reliable code completion, easy debugging, cross-browser portability and compiler optimizations.

Those are some highlights. The (new) GWT Developer's Guide has a more detailed explanation of GWT 1.5 changes, including notes about a few breaking changes you'll want to be aware of. For further information or for help getting started with GWT, you may find the follow links helpful:

If you're new to GWT, the Getting Started Guide takes you through a very quick example of installing and using GWT.

There's a new in-depth GWT tutorial that guides you through the process of building and enhancing an application from scratch.

If you're particularly curious, you can also browse the entire 1.5 issue list.

We really hope that you'll find that GWT 1.5 helps you build the most sophisticated web apps you can envision. And when you build the next big thing, please share your success stories in the GWT developer forum. Download GWT 1.5

Release Candidate now available: the Google API Libraries for Google Web Toolkit

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

We're happy to say that the first Release Candidates for the Google API Libraries for Google Web Toolkit are now ready to be taken for a test drive. The project is a collection of libraries that provide Java language bindings and API specific plumbing for some Google JavaScript APIs. The goal is to make it easy for developers to use these JavaScript APIs with GWT. Libraries available at this time include a new version of Gears, as well as new libraries for Gadgets and the Google AJAX Search API. Gears 1.1 Library (Release Candidate)
A new version of the Gears library is available. In addition to the earlier version's support for the Gears LocalServer, Database, and WorkerPool, 1.1 adds integrated support for offline applications and updated sample applications. The bindings have also been refactored to use GWT 1.5 JavaScript overlay types and a new package hierarchy. Gadgets 1.0 Library (Release Candidate)
The Gadgets library simplifies gadget development with GWT by automatically generating a Gadget specification from Java source and inserting a selection script in the specification much like a regular GWT project. After compiling your gadget with GWT, all files are in place to publish your gadget. This version currently supports the legacy Gadgets API based on the _IG_... namespace. Google AJAX Search 1.0 Library (Release Candidate)
The Google AJAX Search API lets you put Google Search in your web pages, including Web, Local, and Multimedia searches. This library allows you to access the API from Java code compiled with the GWT compiler without having to write additional JavaScript code. If you've been following the early milestone builds, you may also be aware that a Google Maps API Library for GWT is in the works. Stay tuned for a release candidate for that library. With this set of release candidates, each library is now distributed separately so that you can download only the specific library you are interested in. We encourage you to try these release candidates out and give us feedback, either through the issue tracker on code.google.com, or through the Google-Web-Toolkit or Google-Web-Toolkit-Contributors group.

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