GWT 1.5 RC1, Getting Closer

Dietrich Kappe, Friday, June 6, 2008 @ 12:41 pm

I've been working with GWT 1.5 out of the source repository for a few months, so the release announcements for GWT 1.5 kind of went by unnoticed. But now it's getting serious. GWT 1.5 Release Candidate 1 is out, which means that GWT 1.5 is soon to follow and everyone will soon be enjoying the benefits of 1.5 that I've been relishing for a while. What are some of those benefits?

• Support for Java 1.5. Now you can write List<String> and the like, which also makes writing GWT-RPC a lot cleaner. (I'll have a post later on how to improve the grails GWT plugin with gwt 1.5 later.) Also, you won't have to have separate builds for your GWT and server-side code.
• JavaScript type "overlays." From the compiler release notes:
  

  It is now possible to subclass the GWT JavaScriptObject (JSO) class to create Java "class overlays" onto arbitrary JavaScript objects. Thus, you can get the benefits of modeling JS objects as proper Java types (e.g. code completion, refactoring, inlining) without any additional memory or speed overhead. This capability makes it possible to use JSON structures optimally and serves as the basis for the all-new GWT DOM package.

• High performance, type-safe DOM API
• Default CSS themes: Standard, Chrome, and Dark.

The last is definitely the easiest, but I wouldn't sell it short. I think one of the reasons that Ext JS has had such phenomenal success is that it provides a good looking UI out of the box.

For those with an existing 1.4 application, there is an upgrade guide in the GWT wiki. While there, give some of the other 1.5 pages a read. There's a lot more in 1.5 than just the above 4 highlights.

On the IDE front, I can tell you from personal experience that Intellij IDEA's GWT plugin has issues with 1.5. Other folks are also running into issues. Both gwt4nb (netbeans) and cypal studio (Eclipse) seem stuck on 1.4 without any announcements for what they plan for 1.5.

Related posts:

1. GWT IDE Goodness
2. GWT 1.5: Get Ready to Fix All of Your JSNI that Uses long
3. IT Mill Toolkit 5 out of Beta
4. Release of GWT Ext 2.0
5. IDE Watch – GWT Plugin for IntelliJ

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