GWT 2.5.1 Final is Here!

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!

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

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.

- Bhaskar Janakiraman, GWT Team.

GWT 2.5 Final is here!

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!

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

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

This year has brought many changes to GWT, from Super Dev Mode and Elemental to the creation of the GWT Steering Committee (which Vaadin is proud to be a part of).

As part of the committee, Vaadin would like to learn more about the community that we all serve, so together with Ray Cromwell (Google representative and acting Committee Chair), Artur Signell (Vaadin representative), Mike Brock (RedHat representative), David Chandler (Developer Advocate at Google), Daniel Kurka (mgwt, gwt-phonegap), and Bhaskar Janakiraman (Google), we came up with The Future of GWT survey.  Please help us understand:

• How should GWT develop?
• What technologies should it better support?
• What are best practices within the community?
• What is your opinion on the future of GWT?

Information is king - So once we collect all the data from this survey, we’ll work together to build The Future of GWT Report. We’re happy to publicly share all the information we find with you, so that we can all make educated decisions about the future!

Can you take 10 mins to fill out The Future of GWT survey?

GWT Support for Mobile App Development

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