Agile Ajax

GWT 1.4 RC Now Available

Dietrich Kappe, Thursday, May 31, 2007 @ 8:49 am

GWT 1.4 RC has been released. What's new? Just a sample:

  • Code generation is more efficient, maybe 10-20% smaller than in 1.3.
  • Improved loading code lowers load times by a third.
  • Lots of new widget enhancements, including the RichTextArea. Since a rich text editor seems to be a big requirement in lots of content managent apps, removing the need to drop in FCK or TinyMCE gets rid of a big debugging headache.
  • ImageBundle does the whole image concatenation thing for you. Basically, you glue all of your images into one image, and use CSS to clip just the image you want. That way you only have to do one image load instead of a few dozen for a image-rich app. Here's a post by one of the guys at Zimbra explaining what's involved in more detailed.

I'm especially excited by the new deployment options:

  • GWT RPC is no longer tied to exclusively to servlets. New modularized RPC server code makes it easy to connect GWT RPC to your choice of Java back-ends.
  • Adding GWT modules to an HTML page has been simplified: just add a <script> tag. You no longer need to use <meta name="'gwt:module'"> and <script src="gwt.js">. Just reference your module and go.
  • Cross-site script inclusion is now supported. The compiler produces a "-xs" (meaning "cross-site") version of your module's startup script that can be included without being restricted by the same-origin policy. Be careful, though. Including scripts from other sites that you don't fully trust is a big security risk.

All of those issues I've had with GWT just got solved. No more trying to plunk around trying to figure out why your module isn't loading in a different page on your site. or why it won't load on a third-party site. Also, integrating GWT with existing backend services was a bit of a hack; now replacing an existing interface with GWT becomes more feasible.

Here's hoping that all of the IDE folks, JetBrains, etc., update their GWT plugins soon to take advantage of the new features.



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Comments: 2 so far

  1. Yep, you’re definitely right. It’s not bearable that e.g. an existing service, running in a spring-app suddenly has to extend a Servlet-class just to add a bit RPC stuff to it. I’m really looking forward to hacking with GWT 1.4 - although I usually prefer stable, released versions :-)

    Comment by Michael, Tuesday, July 31, 2007 @ 10:15 am

  2. Thanks for the link to my Image Concatenation article….although…I don’t work at Zimbra :D The article was inspired by a talk given by one of the Zimbra guys at the Ajax Experience, though.

    Comment by Matt, Tuesday, August 21, 2007 @ 8:35 pm

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