Google announces GWT 2.0 Milestone 1

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) developer Amit Manjhi has announced the availability of the first milestone release of version 2.0 of the popular web framework. According to Manjhi, the preview release is still considered to be "unfinished and buggy" but provides early access to the core functionality that will be included in GWT 2.0.

The developers note that the release includes some terminology changes such as replacing the term "hosted mode" with "development mode" and using "production mode" rather than "web mode". Due to a new plug-in approach used to implement development mode, the download itself is no longer platform-specific which means that the same file can be used on every development platform. Previously GWT hosted mode provided a "hosted browser" for users to debug their code in; GWT 2.0 now allows users to debug code within normal browsers such as Safari, Firefox, IE or Chrome, using a native-code plug-in for each browser.

Developers now have the option to split their code into multiple fragments to improve startup time and the updated UiBinder allows developers to create user interfaces "mostly declaratively" using XML as opposed to programatically. GWT 2.0 now uses HtmlUnit for running tests; HtmlUnit is 100% Java which also enables the single distribution of GWT 2.0 for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

As with all development releases, use in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised. The developers ask users testing the release to report any problems that they experience so that any major bugs can be addressed. The latest stable release of the Google Web Toolkit is version 1.7.1.

More details about the release, including a list of known issues and breaking changes, can be found in the release announcement. GWT 2.0 Milestone 1 is available to download from Google Code. The Google Web Toolkit is released under version 2.0 of the Apache License and includes other libraries that are licensed under the Mozilla Public License, Eclipse Public License and LGPL.

(crve)