It's been a while since we've put together what's been going on in the GWT community, and there's no time like the present to do so. Below are a handful of updates and new releases that have taken place over the past few months.

Smart GWT 2.1: Smart GWT, a framework that provides enhanced widgets that can coexist on both your client and server, has released a 2.1 version. Below are some of the key features of this release:

  • GWT 2.0.3 compatible
  • New Graphite theme
  • Support for widgets in ListGrid cells
  • Support for Checkbox TreeGrid with cascade selection and tri-state checkboxes (selected, unselected, partial)
  • Significant improvement in ToolStrip appearance
  • Improved Print support with fine grain control over what widgets and data appears in print view
  • Support for Flash, ActiveX, Applets and SVG as Smart GWT widgets
  • Various performance improvements

GWT Designer 7.3: Instantiations announced an upgrade to version 7.3 of its popular graphical user interface (GUI) building product, GWT Designer™. GWT Designer v7.3 stays in sync with the major new release of the open source Google Web Toolkit (GWT) version 2.0, adding support for the new GWT 2.0 Development Mode, Layout Panels, Widgets and more. The upgrade includes the following features:
  • GWT 2.0 Development Mode Support – provides the ability to debug your project with the browser of your choice. Includes multi-browser debugging, allowing you connect to multiple browsers in a single debugging session and network support, plus a view to embed development mode logging messages directly into an Eclipse view.
  • Layout Panels - Employ all new GWT 2.0 Layout Panel types. Layout Panels offer a predictable, constraint-based layout system on top of standard CSS to help you reliably create a desired layout.
  • Widgets - Enjoy greater design flexibility with support for all new GWT 2.0 in-line widgets (Label, HTML and Hyperlink).
  • Enhanced Ext GWT (GXT) Support – Utilize added support for GXT 2.1 and un-typed GXT events.

RaphaelGWT: The Hydro4GE team has open sourced their RaphaelGWT project. RaphaelGWT allows you to integrate GWT with Raphael, a lightweight JavaScript library for cross-platform vector graphics.

Gilead Update: Gilead, an Open-Source framework for seamless integration of Hibernate and GWT, has released an updated version of its project that contains the following features:

  • Predefined remote services
  • A new specific transport annotation (@LimitedAccess) to implement custom access to entity fields (role based for example)
  • Lazy property checking on the GWT side, to know if a null association on client side was already null on server or just lazy but not loaded (and thus replaced with null by Gilead)
  • A ConfigurationHelper class, to limit Gilead configuration to one line of code

GWT MVC 0.4: The GWT MVC project, aimed at creating a layer on top Google Web Toolkit's widget library capable of implementing RIAs in easier and more conceptually guided way based on Model-View-Controller design pattern, has released version 0.4.

GWT Service Resolver: The gwtserviceresolver project has been added to Google code. Similar to gwt-dispatch, gwtserviceresolver allows you to minimize the code changes that are necessary as you add new RPC services.

GWT Mosaic: The GWT Mosaic project has added some tutorials to help developers wire up UiBinder-based elements with GWT Mosaic Actions.