Google takes a major step towards assuring GWTs future
Wednesday, July 4, 2012
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It's really good news for developers using
the Google Web Toolkit: the
Mountain View giant took steps this week to
assure the future of GWT, its popular
open-source web-app development tool. While the
product
has seen a rapid increase in its adoption by
developers, and even been
credited with a jump in new Java users, there
has been uneasiness in the
software community about Google's level of
commitment to the product.
The fact that Google is in the early stages of
developing a competing
language for web coders, DART, has not made GWT
users feel more
confidant about the product's
future.
But GWT (the language we at
Members Only have adopted for all our future
web development) is so widely used that it now
has a lively aftermarket and numerous large
corporate users, all of whom are invested in
GWT's continued well-being.
It is these
firms that sought, and won, the creation of the
new committee that will oversee GWT's
development. They include Sencha and
Vaadin,
the developers of two popular libraries
that build on to GWT, as well Linux giant Red Hat and
web developers ArcBees. Google will also
have a seat on the committee, and Google's
current project manager for GWT, Ray Cromwell,
will be the initial chair of the group.
The steering committee will govern the
open-source development of GWT, including
determining who can commit code to the project
repository, and selecting features for each
release. Cromwell pointed out in his
announcement that the process is similar to
that governing the development of Eclipse, the
widely used Java code-editing tool, which was
created at IBM but handed over to the Eclipse
Foundation.
GWT 2.5, the final release
under the old Google-controlled process, is due
out in August. Reports at Google I/O are that
it produces much smaller code and compiles much
faster, both good news for users.