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GWT 2.8 Released! 25 Oct 2016 1:04 PM (9 years ago)

GWT 2014 Survey 1 Dec 2014 3:26 PM (10 years ago)

GWT 2.7 Finalized! 21 Nov 2014 2:55 PM (10 years ago)

Thanks to everyone who pitched in and helped test GWT 2.7 RC1. We are happy to announce that GWT 2.7 is now final. 

See release notes for a summary of changes. 

You can download this release from here. We also have a new GPE that includes Super Dev Mode support, get it from here.

- GWT and GPE Teams

GWT.create 2015 is around the corner... 18 Nov 2014 3:12 PM (10 years ago)

GWT 2.7 RC1 is here! 4 Nov 2014 9:15 AM (10 years ago)

GWT.create 2015 Conference 4 Sep 2014 2:10 PM (11 years ago)

Vaadin is hosting the second GWT.create conference, with repeat events in Mountain View and Munich. This is going to be another exciting event, connecting GWT developers worldwide.

The following is a guest blog post from Fredrik Rönnlund of Vaadin Ltd.

GWT.create Conference, January 22-23. 27-28, 2015

The largest dedicated GWT conference is back in January.

Last year over 650 people joined the GWT.create conference and this time we're redoing the conference as an even larger conference.

We're happy to announce speakers from Google's GWT team, the original creators of GWT Bruce Johnson and Joel Webber from FullStory and steering committee members from Red Hat, Sencha, ArcBees, JetBrains, Bizo, Vaadin and many many more.

Come and hear about GWT3, Web Components, Polymer and Paper, Super Dev Mode, Functional UIs and remote controlled drones. This is your chance to collaborate with the core GWT teams, pitch your ideas and grab a beer in good company around emerging trends.

Early bird 20% discounted pricing available until September 30th at http://gwtcreate.com/register/.


See you in Mountain View, CA or Munich, Germany in January.

GWT 2.6.1 is here! 9 May 2014 11:35 PM (11 years ago)

GWT 2.6.0 Final is here! 30 Jan 2014 2:14 PM (11 years ago)

We have finally completed all validation and are happy to announce GWT 2.6.0. It took a while for this release to materialize after RC1, but thanks to the efforts of many people in the community, GWT 2.6.0 is now much improved and ready for release.

You can download this release from here.

GWT 2.6 RC1 is here! 13 Nov 2013 11:07 PM (11 years ago)

GWT 2013 Survey 31 Oct 2013 9:57 AM (11 years ago)

GWT.create Conference 18 Oct 2013 8:30 AM (12 years ago)

Vaadin is hosting the first GWT-only conference since 2007, with repeat events in both San Francisco and Frankfurt.  This promises to be the most exciting event for GWT developers in 2013.

The following is a guest blog post from Fredrik Rönnlund of Vaadin Ltd.


GWT.create Conference, December 12-13 & 17-19, 2013

GWT News 15 Jul 2013 3:33 PM (12 years ago)

New Domain and Web-site

New Source Repository, Review System, Jenkins-based Automation for Commits

GWT Roadmap Published

GWT Meetup 2013 Event

Upcoming

GWT 2.5.1 Final is Here! 11 Mar 2013 9:28 PM (12 years ago)

Thanks to all developers who helped us test GWT 2.5.1 release candidate. Testing went well, and we are happy to announce availability of GWT 2.5.1 Final.

You can download this release from our main GWT download page.  Release notes are here.

- GWT Team

GWT 2.5.1 RC1 is here! 14 Feb 2013 2:54 PM (12 years ago)

Today we are excited to announce GWT 2.5.1 Release Candidate 1.  Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release.

GWT 2.5.1 is a maintenance release, with many bug fixes. For a quick run-down of GWT 2.5.1 changes, read the release notes.

You can download this release from here.

- GWT Team

GWT Survey Results 5 Dec 2012 10:06 AM (12 years ago)

The results of the survey conducted by Vaadin Ltd. are now available. This survey had over 1300 respondents, and lots of suggestions for improving GWT. See the Vaadin blog post about this here.

GWT 2.5 Final is here! 26 Oct 2012 4:15 PM (13 years ago)

Thanks to all developers who helped us test GWT 2.5 release candidates and reported issues to us. We have fixed several of these and are happy to announce availability of GWT 2.5 Final.

You can download this release from our main GWT download page.  Release notes are here.

- GWT Team

GWT 2.5 RC2 is here! 4 Oct 2012 3:53 PM (13 years ago)

Today we are excited to announce GWT 2.5 Release Candidate 2.  For a quick run-down of GWT 2.5 features, read our earlier blog post here.

You can download this release from our main GWT download page.

The release notes have a short summary of changes in RC2.

- GWT Team

GWT Survey 19 Sep 2012 2:14 PM (13 years ago)

Vaadin Ltd., as part of the newly-formed GWT Steering Committee, has drafted an online survey for GWT users. The following is a guest blog post from David Booth of Vaadin Ltd.

The Future of GWT Survey

GWT Support for Mobile App Development 23 Jul 2012 3:20 PM (13 years ago)

If you’re interested in using GWT to build mobile apps and mobile web apps from a single codebase, then you’ll want to take a good look at mgwt. The following is a guest blog post from Daniel Kurka, the creator of the mgwt library.


Going mobile with mgwt and gwt-phonegap

mgwt is a library for developing mobile apps and mobile websites with GWT using a single codebase. mgwt provides native-looking widgets and effects for most of the popular mobile platforms. It also comes with a ton of other useful features for building mobile apps. We’ve detailed some of them later on in the post.

gwt-phonegap enables GWT apps to use Phonegap. With Phonegap, HTML5 applications can access the same device features that native apps can use via Javascript APIs, such as the camera, file system or contacts.

With mgwt and gwt-phonegap, you can deploy your GWT applications to any app store that Phonegap supports (such as the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store), or let your users access them as a mobile-enhanced web applications. Both projects are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License, and are available from Maven Central.

Some of the key features in mgwt and gwt-phonegap:

• mobile widgets that are compatible with UiBinder and the Editor Framework
• a DOM API for touch and animation events that corresponds to HTML5 and CSS3, and gesture recognizers built on top these APIs that detect the most common gestures on mobile devices
• themes for iPhone, iPad, Android phones, Android tablets, and BlackBerry
• auto-generated HTML5 offline manifest to support development of offline applications
• in GWT’s development mode, gwt-phonegap emulates the Phonegap API, so that developers can debug and test Phonegap applications from within their IDE
• support for GWT RPC in a Phonegap environment

One of the most impressive things about mgwt is how closely the widgets and effects resemble their native counterparts on each specific platform.

For example, this is how some of the widgets look on iOS and Android:






















mgwt is built for performance and uses many GWT core concepts to be as efficient as possible. As mobile app developers know, performance and efficiency are critcal.

Both mgwt and gwt-phonegap are built by Daniel Kurka, who is one of the GWT Steering Committee members.

Want to learn more? Check out the mgwt homepage and the blog. There’s also a 90-minute talk on mgwt presented at the Dutch Google Developer Group (GDG), and a post on Daniel’s blog with a more detailed description of mgwt’s features.

Links

mgwt homepage: http://www.m-gwt.com
blog: http://blog.daniel-kurka.de
mgwt talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V0CdhMFiao&feature=plcp
mgwt features: http://blog.daniel-kurka.de/2012/07/mgwt-going-mobile-with-gwt-phonegap.html
Daniel Kurka: http://www.daniel-kurka.de

GWT 2.5 RC is here! 27 Jun 2012 11:42 AM (13 years ago)

Angry Birds Chrome now uses the Web Audio API 31 Jan 2012 1:15 PM (13 years ago)

Cross-posted with the Google Code Blog

Last week Angry Birds for Chrome was updated to use the Web Audio API for all its in-game audio for Chrome users, which means Chrome users get the full Angry Birds experience, without any plugins. The Web Audio API supports a wide variety of use cases, including the high fidelity and low latency requirements of games. Users of other supported browsers will still get sound via Flash or HTML5 audio.

How does this cross-browser audio magic work? As you may have seen or heard, Angry Birds was in no small part made possible by the cross-platform open source PlayN library. When building for the HTML platform, PlayN in turn relies heavily on Google Web Toolkit (GWT) to delivery a highly optimized web experience for users, and on gwt-voices to easily deliver a cross-browser audio experience.

The responsibility of choosing the appropriate audio API for the game's sound is (mostly) left up to gwt-voices, which chooses the audio API that will give the best experience. If you'd like to hear how other audio APIs perform, you can ask gwt-voices to try to use the Web Audio API, Flash, HTML5 Audio, or even native audio. Your mileage will vary by browser and platform and which plugins you have installed. Also, gwt-voices will select the best available fallback, if the desired audio API is not going to work at all in your environment.

Want to learn more? Check out the Web Audio API tutorial and don't let those pigs grunt too much.

Google Plugin for Eclipse (GPE) is Now Open Source 16 Nov 2011 8:58 AM (13 years ago)

GWT and Dart 10 Nov 2011 6:39 AM (13 years ago)

The Google Web Toolkit team has been asked recently about our plans following the announcement of the Dart programming language a few weeks ago.

Dart and GWT both share the goal of enabling structured web programming. In fact, many of the same engineers who brought you GWT are working on Dart. We view Dart as an ambitious evolution of GWT’s mission to make web apps better for end users, and we’re optimistic about its potential. As Dart evolves and becomes ready for prime time, we anticipate working closely with the GWT developer community to explore Dart.

Meanwhile, rest assured that GWT will continue to be a productive and reliable way to build the most ambitious web apps — and even games like Angry Birds. Key projects within Google rely on GWT every day, and we plan to continue improving (and open-sourcing) GWT based on their real-world needs.

Pictarine: pictures in the cloud 19 Sep 2011 10:32 AM (14 years ago)

Cross posted from the Google App Engine blog.

Pictarine is a photo management web application, launched in 2010, that allows people to easily manage and share all of their photos from Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Twitter and other sites. Pictarine developers Guillaume Martin and Maxime Rafalimanana have contributed the following post discussing their experiences using Google App Engine and Google Web Toolkit.

From the start, we used Google technologies in developing Pictarine and we wanted to share our experience with them so far. In this post, we will shed some light on the weaknesses and strengths we found in Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and Google App Engine. We will also discuss how we leveraged GWT to build a new technology that allows Pictarine to seamlessly display photos from the computer directly into the browser. The following diagram is an overview of how our application works.


Building a mashup in the cloud with Google App Engine

The Pictarine team is made of a web designer and two developers who previously worked mainly with Java based enterprise technologies and had a little experience with web technologies. When we started the project in early 2009, we were quite open on learning new languages like Python or Ruby, but when App Engine announced that Java would be supported, we were really excited to give Google App Engine a try.

The first few months, learning about the App Engine environment was quite easy and dare I say fun. Testing our code on Google’s servers from Eclipse IDE was only one click away. So we built our first prototype fast and we quickly decided to adopt App Engine. Then we started to build the core of our application: the engine that uses the API from Flickr, Picasa, Facebook to fetch the users’ photos. This is where we hit the first limitations of App Engine. Most users have a lot of photos on these services and retrieving them can take some time. But App Engine has strict limits on how long a request should last: an outgoing HTTP request cannot last more than 10 seconds and cannot process a request for more than 30 seconds. So while building our architecture we found ourselves writing approximately one third of our code dealing with these limitations: paginating our requests, creating background tasks to store data in small batches, etc.

In early 2010, when we launched our alpha version, everything went smoothly. We had some good press coverage and App Engine met our expectations in handling our first users. During 2010, we worked on implementing new features requested by our users, and during this period of time we were really impressed by the way App Engine evolved. Many of the limitations were lifted and great new features were added. We are now able to use Task Queues for requests that last up to 10 minutes, which we fully use to sync our users’ photos and albums. One of the features we like the most is the Channel API, a push notification system that allows us to instantly show a photo in every connected browser as soon as it is uploaded. App Engine is still not perfect but has greatly improved and when we see its roadmap, we are quite confident it will continue to improve.

Building a fresh photo experience with Google Web Toolkit 

When we started Pictarine, we wanted a fast, distraction free interface that would allow our users to focus on their photos. We wanted the interface to adapt to the screen resolution, displaying a lot of photos on large screens and fewer on small ones. We wanted it to be automatically updated when new comments or new photos are added. We wanted a web application. As we eliminated Flash quite quickly (based on our user experience...) we started to look at tools to build HTML/CSS/Javascript applications. We settled quickly on GWT: while coding in Java, with all the tools we are used to (even the debugger), we could produce optimized Javacript that would run in every browser! When we started with GWT, it was already 3 years old, so we had few complaints about it. The main issue was that we had to always keep in mind that the Java code we produced was ultimately translated to Javascript. So some Java methods, such as the Reflection API, are not allowed. Another thing that was not obvious to us when we started with GWT was that a java developer needs an intimate knowledge of HTML/CSS if he/she wants to go beyond the basic user interface provided by the GWT widgets.

What we really like about GWT in our architecture is the ability to share code between client and server: we can use the same Photo or Album class on the client and the server and the GWT RPC system allows us to automatically share the same Java object on both side. We can also have the same data validation code on both sides: we can alert the user immediately on errors and still validate the data on the server just in case.

Another great feature we like about GWT is its handling of internationalisation. From the beginning we wanted to build a website available for all Internet users, so supporting English as well as our native language (French) was almost obligatory. Fortunately, GWT makes it really easy to generate centralized localization files so that we just have to translate.

Finally, to illustrate how great Javascript generation is, when IE9 came out, we waited a few weeks for GWT to support it and our application was compatible after a recompile! Of course, the IE9 team also did a good job with their HTML5/CSS3 engine.

Building an universal uploader 

After the launch of our alpha in 2010, our users were able to see and share their photos from Flickr, Picasa, Facebook. But they still had to put their photos on these websites first before coming to Pictarine. This limitation quickly became the first request on our feedback system. We needed to let our users do everything from Pictarine, including uploading photos. Uploading many photos from a website is still not a trivial process. Most websites choose Flash to allow users to upload multiple files at once, but our experience with it was that it often crashed after a while. Some use Java applets, but they are never well integrated and always look odd. At Pictarine we decided to tackle this problem by using Java Applet for their stability across all platforms but without using it to render photos or folders.

We have built a technology that uses the GWT RPC mechanism to talk to a Java Applet: photos, upload progression are rendered in HTML/CSS and the applet takes care of photos resizing and uploading. Sharing a photo from a camera is now a one-step process. This technology also allows users to browse their local files directly in their browser and it is fully integrated in our design.

We believe that this new use of Java applets can help blur the line between the Desktop and the Cloud by seamlessly integrating desktop files in any web application.



In conclusion, we can say that we are really happy with the choices we made with App Engine and GWT. App Engine is a great service that perfectly handled the spike in traffic we saw right after articles on Mashable and Lifehacker were published. So we recommend it to every lean startup out there who loves developing in Java, Python or Go.

Working with Maven and RequestFactory in GWT 2.4 16 Sep 2011 3:28 PM (14 years ago)

GWT 2.4 introduced changes to both Maven and RequestFactory, and we've recently updated the GWT wiki and sample apps with the latest and greatest:

• WorkingWithMaven (with instructions for Eclipse 3.5, 3.6, 3.7)
• RequestFactoryInterfaceValidation

RequestFactory now does compile-time validation to ensure that your service implementations match your client-side interfaces. This feature is implemented using an annotation processor which must be configured in Eclipse or in your Maven POM. When configured in Eclipse, you will now see warnings and errors in the IDE anywhere your client- and server-side RF code don't match.

In addition, the RequestFactory jars are now in Maven Central. Note that the Maven groupId for RF artifacts differs from the rest of the GWT artifacts since RF can be used in Android clients as well as GWT. If you're using RequestFactory instead of GWT-RPC, you no longer need gwt-servlet. Instead, you can use the much smaller requestfactory-server jar and requestfactory-apt (which contains the RF interface validation tool). You do not need requestfactory-client for GWT projects as the required classes are already included in gwt-user. The requestfactory-client jar is intended for non-GWT (Android) clients using RequestFactory.

  <dependency>
   <groupId>com.google.web.bindery</groupId>
   <artifactId>requestfactory-server</artifactId>
   <version>2.4.0</version>
  </dependency>
  
  <!-- see sample projects for correct placement -->
  <dependency>
   <groupId>com.google.web.bindery</groupId>
   <artifactId>requestfactory-apt</artifactId>
   <version>2.4.0</version>
  </dependency>
  

The mobilewebapp and dynatablerf samples show everything working together and have been tested in Eclipse 3.6 and 3.7.

If you also have the Eclipse Subversive plugin installed (see http://www.shareyourwork.org/roller/ralphsjavablog/entry/eclipse_indigo_maven_and_svn), you should be able to try the mobilewebapp sample as easily as

 
1. File > Import > Checkout Maven projects from SCM, point to https://google-web-toolkit.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/samples/mobilewebapp
 
2. Run as > Web application

Special thanks to Jeff Larsen for the RequestFactory POM sauce that works in Eclipse Indigo!